Terms of service

1. Who these terms are between

These terms are the agreement between you and Polyfetti, the trading name of Sawai Nolly Auxilio, for translation of documents you submit. You accept them when you submit a request.

2. What we do

We do three kinds of work. Which one you have ordered decides which parts of these terms apply to you, so it is worth knowing which is which.

• Document translation. We translate documents between Japanese and English, prepare them in a consistent bilingual layout, check them, and deliver them to you digitally or on paper. Where you ask for certified translation, a named human translator reviews the work and signs a statement of accuracy with their contact details. Sections 4 and 5 are written for this work.
• Business and marketing translation. We translate business material — agreements, listings, manuals, site and product copy, marketing text — in the language pair shown on your quote. It is priced by the character rather than by the page, and it carries no certificate unless you ask for one.
• Copywriting and original writing. We write new material to your brief, in the language you ask for. This is not a translation of anything: it is original text written for your purpose, and section 9 says who owns it.

Business translation and copywriting are ordinarily delivered to you and to nobody else. Nothing in them is submitted to an authority, and no authority accepts or rejects them, so the parts of these terms about receiving authorities do not apply to that work.

3. What we do not do

This section matters more than most. Please read it.

• We do not prepare, complete, or submit applications on your behalf, and we do not act as your representative before any authority.
• We do not give immigration, legal, tax, labour or medical advice, and nothing we send you is advice about your particular situation.
• We do not notarise documents and do not issue apostilles. A notary performs the first; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs performs the second.
• We are not a government body. No document we produce is official, government-approved, or issued by any authority. A certified translation is a signed statement of accuracy by a named translator — nothing more, and we will never describe it as more.
• Where your matter needs a licensed professional — an administrative scrivener, an attorney, a tax accountant, a labour and social security attorney — we will say so, and we can point you toward one. Any such referral is information, not a recommendation or a guarantee.

4. Acceptance is never guaranteed, and results are never promised

For a document you are going to submit. We cannot promise that any authority, embassy, school, employer or court will accept a translation. That decision belongs entirely to them and often turns on things outside the translation — the form of the original, its issue date, its recency, apostille or notarisation requirements, or a rule that changed last week.

For business translation and copywriting. We do not promise a result. How many people read, click, reply, book or buy depends on your product, your price, your audience, your timing and your market, none of which we control and none of which we will pretend to. We will not quote a figure we cannot stand behind, and if anyone tells you we have, they are not speaking for us. What we are responsible for is the work itself: that it says what you asked it to say, in correct language, and that it is ours to give you.

What we do instead: we tell you what the receiving authority publishes as its requirements, with the date we checked, and we prepare the document to those published requirements. If a rejection is caused by an error in our translation, we correct it free of charge and refund if a correction cannot put it right. If a rejection is caused by something else, we will help you understand what the authority has said, but we cannot refund.

5. What you are responsible for

• Authorisation. You confirm you are entitled to submit the document and to have it translated, including where it contains information about other people.
• Completeness. Send every page and both sides. A missing reverse side is the single most common cause of a document being sent back.
• Name spelling. Tell us the exact romanisation used on your passport or residence card. Japanese names have many valid romanisations and an authority may reject a mismatch. If you do not tell us, we use the standard reading and note the assumption.
• Checking the delivery. Look at what we send you promptly, and tell us about any error within the correction window.
• Lawful use. Do not ask us to translate a document you obtained unlawfully, or to alter meaning, omit content, or produce anything intended to mislead a third party. We will refuse and cancel the order.
• The facts in your copy. Where we write or translate material about your product, service, price or business, the facts in it come from you and remain yours. We write what you tell us, clearly and well. We do not verify it, and we will not invent a claim, a figure, a review, a testimonial or an endorsement — if you ask us to, we will say no. Japanese advertising law (景品表示法) holds the advertiser responsible for a misleading claim, and in your material the advertiser is you.
• Rights in what you send. Where you send us someone else's text, images or brand to work from, you confirm you are entitled to use it for that purpose.

6. Ordering, pricing and payment

• We check your file for readability and completeness before quoting. The check is free.
• The quote shows the total, including certification if you chose it, before you pay.
• Documents are priced per page or per document, at the rates in the commercial disclosure.
• Business and marketing translation is priced per character of the text you send, with a minimum per order. Where text repeats within your document, or repeats work we have already done for you, it is charged at a reduced rate, and larger orders are reduced further. Every count and every reduction is itemised on the quote before you pay, so you can check the arithmetic rather than take our word for it.
• Copywriting and original writing is quoted individually before any work begins. Nothing is charged and nothing is written until you have accepted that quote.
• Work begins once we have confirmed your transfer has arrived.
• Where a document cannot be priced automatically we quote manually before any work starts.
• Full details are in the commercial disclosure.

7. Corrections, revisions, cancellation and refunds

Set out in full in the refund and correction policy, which forms part of these terms. In summary: cancel free before work starts; errors we made are corrected free; if a correction cannot put it right we refund; we cannot refund for an authority's decision to reject.

Revisions are a different thing from corrections, and it matters which one you are asking for. A correction is us putting right something we got wrong, and it is always free. A revision is you changing your mind about what you want — a different angle, a shorter version, a warmer tone — and it is normal, expected, and part of writing. Where a piece of work includes revision rounds, your quote says how many, and using them is not a complaint. If you want more rounds than your quote includes, we will price them and tell you before we do any of the work, never after.

8. Your documents and your privacy

Governed by our privacy policy. In short: used only for your order, seen by the fewest people possible, source files deleted after 14 days and delivered files after 30, never sold, and never used to train anything.

9. Ownership

What you sent us stays yours. Your original document remains yours throughout. We will not publish it or use it as an example, even anonymised, without asking you first.

Translations. Once you have paid in full, the translation is yours to use for any lawful purpose.

Writing we made for you. Copywriting and original writing are new work, so copyright in them begins with us. On full payment it transfers to you, along with the right to edit it, cut it, adapt it, retitle it, translate it and publish it wherever you like, with or without our name on it.

Japanese law does not permit an author's moral rights (著作者人格権) to be transferred to anybody, so we cannot sell you ours and no agreement can. What we do instead is undertake not to exercise them — against you, or against anyone you licence the work to. In plain terms: you can change what we wrote, use it without crediting us, and we will not object. This is the standard arrangement for commissioned writing in Japan, and it exists because the alternative would leave you owning text you were not free to edit.

It is ours to give you. We write original material. We do not copy anyone else's work into yours, and we do not hand you text we are not free to hand over.

What stays ours. Our templates, glossaries, translation memory and software are not part of what you are buying, and remain ours.

10. Our responsibility if something goes wrong

We take responsibility for the accuracy of our translation. If we make an error we correct it, and if a correction cannot put it right we refund what you paid.

Beyond that, our liability for any one order is limited to the amount you paid for it, except where the loss is caused by our intentional act or gross negligence, or where Japanese law does not permit that limit. Nothing in these terms limits any right you have as a consumer under Japanese law, and any clause that would do so does not apply.

11. Suspending or refusing an order

We may decline or stop an order where the document is unreadable and cannot be replaced, where we have no approved template for it and cannot safely produce one, where the request falls outside what we lawfully do, where we are asked to alter meaning, or where payment is not confirmed. If we stop an order after you have paid and the reason is not your fault, we refund in full.

12. What we will not translate

We will decline, and cancel an order already placed, if we are asked to translate a document obtained unlawfully, or to change meaning, omit content, add anything that is not in the original, or produce a version designed to mislead whoever reads it. Where we have already been paid, we refund in full.

This is not a formality. The documents you send us are used to make decisions about people's lives, and a translation that quietly says something the original does not is a serious thing. It is also the one request we will refuse regardless of what is offered for it.

13. Who may place an order

You must be 18 or older to order, or have the agreement of a parent or guardian. You may order a translation of a document about somebody else — a child, a parent, a spouse — where you are entitled to hold that document, which is the same condition as the consent notice.

We do not verify age, and we are not going to ask you for identification to buy a translation. This clause exists so that the answer is written down, not so that we can police it.

14. If we cannot work

If something outside our control stops us working — illness, a disaster, a failure at a service we depend on — we will tell you within one business day and give you the choice: wait for a new date, or take a full refund. We will not hold your money while we are unable to deliver, and we will not quietly let a deadline pass.

An unmet deadline caused by us is not something we ask you to absorb. If the delay makes the translation useless to you, that is a refund, whatever the cause.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version that applies to your order is the one published when you submitted it. Significant changes are notified to customers with an open order.

16. Governing law

Japanese law governs. Specify the agreed court — note that a consumer's local court cannot be excluded, so this clause needs qualified review before it goes live.

17. Contact

hello@polyfetti.com. Our registered address and telephone number are disclosed on request — see the commercial disclosure.