Careful words
across the Hanzi divide.

We were founded by Grace Lam, a court interpreter who grew tired of watching contracts fall apart over a single mistranslated clause. Her idea was unfashionable even then: that a translation is a piece of craftsmanship, that the person who did the work should put their name to it, and that a client should always be able to telephone the human being responsible. Twenty-six years later, that is still exactly how the house is run.

We are deliberately small. Nine full-time linguists work from the studio in Sheung Wan, with a trusted circle of specialist freelancers in Guangzhou, Taipei and Macau for the harder pairs. Every document that leaves us has been drafted by one translator and independently reviewed by a second, a four-eyes rule we have never relaxed, not for a rush job and not for a regular client.

Our work sits mostly in three worlds: the legal (statements of claim, affidavits, company records for the Companies Registry), the commercial (tender documents, shipping paperwork, patent abstracts for firms trading up the Pearl River Delta), and the personal (birth and marriage certificates, academic transcripts, immigration bundles for families moving between Hong Kong, the Mainland and abroad).

“A good translation should be invisible. The reader forgets it was ever written in another tongue.”

We are not a software portal and we do not run your papers through a machine and post the result. When you send us a document, a real person reads it, asks the awkward questions early, and tells you honestly whether the deadline you want is the deadline you will get.