What it is
Sometimes the translator has to say something in their own voice inside the translation: that a stamp is illegible, that a column was empty, that a passage was struck through in the document handed over. Three decisions follow. Whether to say it, where to put it, and by what mark the reader is to know that these words are not the document's.
The options are wide open. A community may reserve a bracket for the purpose, a fixed verbal tag, a footnote or a separate certificate; it may require the intervention, permit it, or say nothing about it. The last is not the absence of a convention, and a translator who reads silence as a licence has misread a regime that regulates elsewhere.
Square brackets also mark other people's interventions in quoted matter, which quotation-marks-and-quoted-matter owns. The test is whose voice the bracket carries: an insertion into a quotation is the quoting author's, and the marks here are the translator's own.
Where the expectation comes from
Three bodies of three different kinds rule this, and no two rule the same question.
- The VVU and BDÜ guidelines for certified document translation in Baden-Württemberg, recommended by that Land's Justice and Education Ministries, address publicly appointed and sworn document translators there. The July 2004 text puts notes at the corresponding point in the translation, tagged "Anm. d. Übers."; marks omissions in an extract translation; has struck-through but legible passages translated and identified as struck through; and forbids dropping any addition of the source. The January 2018 Merkblatt keeps that and adds a rule the earlier text does not contain: "In den Text eingefügte Anmerkungen und Hinweise sowie Fußnoten des Übersetzers sollen in eckigen Klammern stehen."
- The English Style Guide reserves square brackets at 2.21 for editorial insertions in quoted material, for passages still open to discussion in administrative drafting, and for a translation placed after a name left in the original language; at 2.3 an omitted paragraph is replaced by an ellipsis inside square brackets on a line of its own.
- The Kwaliteitsinstituut Wbtv advised the Raad voor Rechtsbijstand in 2021 on what a Dutch sworn translation must show: the details of the translator and of any reviser, the direction of translation, a layout aligned as closely as possible to the source, and a closing formula declaring the translation faithful and accurate over a signature. What it does not do is the finding. It says nothing about notes, brackets, illegibility, strikethrough or omission.
The tier is House throughout, and now on evidence rather than by default. Each could revise its own text without any code changing, and none binds anyone outside its own constituency. The material also shows the range inside the tier: a ministry-recommended regional guideline, an institution's internal guide and a quality body's non-binding advice are all House by the axis test and differ sharply in force.
Consequences for translation
The decision to intervene is graded; the marking, once taken, is not.
- Whether to intervene cannot be checked off. Two competent translations of the same illegible stamp can differ in how much of the translator's voice they make visible, and both comply.
- The marking is determinate, and it has an edition. The square bracket is a 2018 rule in Baden-Württemberg and is absent from the 2004 text, so a finding has to name which edition it is raised under.
- Silence is not permission. A Dutch sworn translation is regulated as to its certification apparatus and its page image and left unregulated as to marks of intervention, where a Baden-Württemberg one is regulated in detail as to both. A translator moving between them is answering a question the other community's guidance never asked.
- Placement is ruled where the mark is ruled. Both German editions send the note into the body and fall back to a footnote only where the layout will not take it, the 2004 text at the end and the 2018 text at the foot of the page.
Examples
EN>DE
- Source: an empty column in a form, and a passage struck through but still legible
- Target: [Anm. d. Übers.: keine Eintragungen], and the struck-through passage translated and identified as struck through in the document produced
- Comment: The tag and the wording for an empty column are the 2004 text's own printed instance; the square brackets around an inserted note are the 2018 Merkblatt's rule at 10.1. Both bind sworn document translators in Baden-Württemberg and nobody else.
DE>NL
- Source: [Anm. d. Übers.: keine Eintragungen]
- Target: the same note, in Dutch, in no prescribed form
- Comment: Nothing in the Dutch sworn regime requires the bracket, the tag or the note. What it does require sits elsewhere: the translator's and any reviser's details, the direction of translation, a layout following the source closely, and a closing declaration over a signature.
References
- Richtlinien und Hinweise für die Anfertigung von Urkundenübersetzungen, Stand Juli 2004, prepared by Edmund Ehlers for the VVU and the BDÜ and recommended by the Justizministerium and the Kultusministerium of Baden-Württemberg. Sections 4.1, 4.2, 6.3, 7.2 and 10, read as the PDF on the association's own site.
- Merkblatt für die Anfertigung von Urkundenübersetzungen, VVU Baden-Württemberg, Stand Januar 2018, produced under the lead of the BDÜ with the professional associations. Sections 10.1 to 10.3. This is the text linked from the association's own current resources page.
- English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 3 August 2026. Sections 2.3 (Ellipsis), 2.19 (Round brackets), 2.20 (Round brackets in citations) and 2.21 (Square brackets).
- Advies van het Kwaliteitsinstituut Wbtv aan de Raad voor Rechtsbijstand inzake de beëdigde vertaling en de gewaarmerkte vertaling, 1 april 2021, section 4, read in full on the Bureau Wbtv site.