Things They Should Invent: foreign-language official document confirmation service

Many freelance translators don't translate birth certificates etc. I don't know if there's a particular business reason for this, but I've done a few as parts of larger files of documentation, and I do know that they are especially annoying to translate. (For the googlers: sorry, I can't translate yours or give you specific advice on how to get yours translated.) For example, I've seen death certificates from France that listed all the pertinent details (and some less-pertinent details such as birthplace and parents' names) in a single run-on sentence of over 100 words. While the gist of the information was simple, it took a not-insignificant amount of actual work to wrestle that sentence into something that the English reader would have a chance of understanding, and I'm never going to be happy with the results because it cannot be made idiomatic in English unless I completely restructure it, which is beyond the scope of translation.

I don't think the end user actually cares whether I reflect the structure of the original. I think they're just looking for the basic death certificate information. So what I'd like to do instead is either produce a summary of the certificate (just list name, time of death, place of death, cause of death in point form without having to worry about the structure of the original) or to issue an official certification letter saying something to the effect of "I hereby certify that the document in question is a death certificate for Pierre Untel."

The logical question at this point is "But then how do we know if the document is real?" The answer to that question is even with normal translation, you still don't know if the document is real. Certifying the validity of documents is outside the scope of the translator's job; we just translate the words on the paper. When I certify the translation, it means that my translation accurately reflects the original. It doesn't mean the original is accurate. I cannot certify the authenticity of the original document any more than I can certify that an article I'm asked to translate is factually correct. Nor would the method I'm proposing hinder the end user's ability to certify the validity of the original document. If the end user knows how to certify the validity of a death certificate from France, they wouldn't need it translated. They'd be familiar enough with the format that they could easily extract the necessary information themselves. In other words, even if they can't read every word on the page, they'd know that this is the space for the deceased's name, and this is the space for time of death, etc. They might have to get the cause of death translated, but that's a 10 minute turnaround at minimum charge rather than an hour spent wrestling with bizarre sentence structure.

Another advantage of this approach is that the less-desirable documentation translation market could be redirected to less-skilled translators without any particular loss of quality. A student in their final year of undergrad or a first-and-a-half generation immigrant looking to earn some extra cash could totally confirm "Yes, this says he was born in Belgium on such-and-such a date" or produce a point-form summary of the death certificate, even if a full translation of the run-on sentences and legalistic language is beyond their skills. This would give the newbies some experience and make it easier for

It sounds like I want the translation industry to invent this, but really what we need is for the end users of translations of official documents (governments, universities, etc.) to accept this kind of simplified translation when they don't actually need a full translation. It would make life easier for everyone, but we can't do it unless the end users would accept it.