Privacy Policy — How We Protect Your Data

The personal data we collect

We collect only what we need to quote for, prepare and deliver a translation, and to meet our own legal obligations.

Information you give us directly

• Contact details — your name, email address, telephone number and, where relevant, your postal address and your firm or organisation.
• Enquiry details — the authority requesting your translation, your deadline, the certification level you need, and anything you tell us in messages, calls or WhatsApp.
• Billing information — the billing name and address, matter or purchase order reference, and records of payments. Card details are handled by our payment provider and are not stored by us.

Information contained in the documents you send us

This is the most sensitive category, and it is why this policy is written carefully. A divorce document, court order or registry extract can contain:

• Full names, dates and places of birth, nationality, and previous names
• Marriage and divorce dates, court and case references, and addresses
• Names and ages of children, and details of child arrangements
• Financial detail such as settlements, property and pension arrangements
• Information revealing religious belief (for example a talaq, khula or get), and occasionally information about health or sexual life where a judgment sets out the grounds for the divorce

Information we collect automatically

• Technical data — IP address, browser type, device type, and pages visited, collected through cookies and similar technologies where you have consented to them.

Why we use your data and our lawful bases

Under the UK GDPR we must have a lawful basis for every use of your personal data. Ours are set out below.

Special category data

Where your documents reveal religious belief, health or sexual life, that is special category data and needs an additional condition under Article 9. We rely on:

• Article 9(2)(f) — processing necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims, which covers translations prepared for courts, tribunals, UKVI and other legal or administrative processes; and
• Article 9(2)(a) — your explicit consent, where you instruct us to translate a document containing such information for a purpose that is not covered above.

We do not use special category data for marketing, profiling or any automated decision-making.

Who we share your data with

We do not sell your personal data, and we never share it for advertising. We share it only where it is necessary to do the work you have asked for.

• The translator assigned to your document — a named professional bound by written confidentiality obligations.
• A reviser or second linguist, where the document is checked by a second professional.
• A notary public or the FCDO, where you have ordered notarisation, an apostille or legalisation.
• Our IT, hosting, email and file-transfer providers, acting as processors under written contracts.
• Our payment provider and accountants, for payment processing and statutory record keeping.
• Professional advisers, insurers or regulators, and courts or law enforcement, where we are legally required to disclose or need to establish or defend a legal claim.

Every processor acts only on our documented instructions and is required to apply appropriate security measures. We do not permit any processor to use your documents for their own purposes, including training artificial intelligence or machine translation systems.

International transfers

Some of our translators work in the country whose legal system a document comes from, which may be outside the UK. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, we make sure it remains protected by relying on one of the following:

• UK adequacy regulations, where the receiving country has been assessed as providing an adequate level of protection;
• the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA), or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses; or
• another safeguard permitted by the UK GDPR, applied together with a transfer risk assessment.

You may ask us for details of the safeguard applied to any particular transfer by contacting us using the details in section 1.

How long we keep your data

We keep personal data only as long as we need it, then delete or securely destroy it. Our standard periods are:

How we keep your data secure

We apply technical and organisational measures appropriate to the sensitivity of divorce paperwork:

• Encrypted transfer of documents, and encryption of data at rest on our systems
• Access restricted to the specific people who need it for your job, on a need-to-know basis
• Written confidentiality obligations for every translator, reviser and contractor
• Secure deletion of files at the end of the retention period
• Regular review of our providers and their security practices

No transmission over the internet is completely secure. If you are concerned about sending a document by email, tell us and we will provide a secure upload link instead.

If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and will inform you directly where the risk to you is high.

Your rights over your data

Under the UK GDPR you have the following rights. There is normally no charge for exercising them, and we will respond within one month.

• Access — to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — to have inaccurate data corrected. Note that we cannot alter the content of a translation to differ from the source document; see section 9.
• Erasure — to have your data deleted, where we have no overriding legal obligation or legitimate ground to retain it.
• Restriction — to limit how we use your data while a concern is being resolved.
• Portability — to receive data you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
• Objection — to object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and to object to direct marketing at any time.
• Withdrawal of consent — where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting processing carried out before withdrawal.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in section 1. We may ask you to verify your identity before we act, which protects you from someone else obtaining your divorce documents.

Complaining to the regulator

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, we would like the chance to put it right first. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time — ico.org.uk, or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.

A note on accuracy and translations

Your right to have inaccurate personal data corrected applies to the records we hold about you. It does not extend to changing the content of a certified translation so that it differs from the document it was taken from.

A certificate of accuracy confirms that the English version matches the original. If we altered a name, date or wording to match a different document, that certification would no longer be true, and the translation would be worthless to the authority receiving it.

Where your name is spelled differently across your documents — because of transliteration, diacritics, patronymics or compound surnames — we record the variation in a translator's note rather than editing it away. If you believe there is a genuine error in a translation we produced, tell us and we will investigate and correct it at no charge.

Cookies and website analytics

Our website uses cookies and similar technologies. Strictly necessary cookies, which are needed for the site to function, are set automatically. All other cookies — including analytics and any advertising cookies — are set only where you have given consent, as required by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003.

• Strictly necessary — session management, security and load balancing. No consent required.
• Analytics — helps us understand which pages are useful. Set only with your consent.
• Functional — remembers preferences such as a chosen turnaround. Set only with your consent.

You can withdraw or change your cookie choices at any time through your browser settings or our cookie banner. Blocking non-essential cookies will not affect your ability to use this site or request a quote.

Children's data

Our services are directed at adults, and we do not knowingly collect personal data directly from children.

However, the documents you send us may contain information about children — for example a child arrangements order or a decree that names dependants. We treat that information with the same care as any other sensitive data in your file, restrict access to the assigned translator, and delete it in line with section 6.

Changes to this policy

We review this policy regularly and will update it where our practices, our providers or the law change. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated.

Where a change materially affects how we use your personal data, we will tell you directly by email before it takes effect, where we hold your contact details and it is reasonable to do so.