Ivy Pires
Ivy Pires grew up in Brazil, around the same kind of documents she now translates for people filing with US immigration.
Six years of Brazilian documents
Portuguese is her first language, and for six years she has been turning Brazilian documents into English, from marriage certificates to school diplomas. Every translation leaves with a certificate she signs herself, in her own name, so there is always a real person answering for every word. Every document is translated first, then reviewed twice for quality assurance. She understands how much every detail matters and what is at stake. After six years and thousands of documents she knows what US immigration expects and what gets accepted, and she knows the same ground for university applications and other legal paperwork.
A lot of the work is in the parts most people skip past: the note on the back of a birth certificate that records a name change, the book and page numbers an officer checks against the original register, the older registry-office handwriting that stops most people cold. Reading those correctly is the difference between a translation an office accepts and one it sends back.
What she signs
Every translation leaves with a Certificate of Accuracy signed in her own name. That signed certificate is what US immigration asks for, and the rule behind it is laid out in plain English on our USCIS translation requirements page. What a finished one looks like is on the annotated sample.
What she shares for free
She put together and keeps up the Portuguese-English false friends list, a free reference of 803 word pairs that look alike across the two languages but mean different things. Each one gives what the word really means and the right translation in both directions, checked against Priberam, Michaelis, Merriam-Webster, and Cambridge. She checks every pair herself and fixes anything a reader reports. Look-alike words are where legal translations quietly go wrong, so the legal pairs are the biggest group on the list.
She also keeps the Brazilian document translation checklist, which tells you what a given document needs for where it is going.
Contact
A question about a document, a source request, or a correction to the false-friends list all reach her the same way, through the contact page or WhatsApp. Corrections to the list are checked and credited.