ClearEnglish Translations (hereinafter including myself) provides services under these terms and conditions. We recommend that you read them before agreeing to receive such services. By accepting our offers in any way, for example by paying an invoice, accepting a purchase order, affirmatively replying to an email with our offer, etc., you accept these Terms of Service in full and agree to follow them.
Scope
These Terms of Service govern the delivery of services by ClearEnglish Translations.
These Terms of Service are subject to change without notice. Updated versions will appear on the official website of ClearEnglish Translations. However, for the sake of reliability, the version of Terms of Service that was published here at the time of placing an order will be effective for that order.
Parties
ClearEnglish Translations (or “we”) is the party delivering the services. The Customer (or “you”) is the party receiving the services. We are willing to offer our services to you, which you are welcome to use. When doing so, you act on your own behalf or on behalf of the company you legally represent. Cooperation between us is voluntary and expresses both your and our free will.
Services
At your request, we may provide the services of translation, localization, editing, proofreading, and other related services.
We do our best to provide the best service we can, which may require us to refer to experts, consultants, native speakers of a language, etc. to ensure proper quality. All products of our services are provided to you on an as-is basis, which means that we provide and you accept them as they are, without any certification or notarization guarantee. At your request, we can certify our products through our internal procedure and issue a document confirming that.
Placing an order
You are welcome to submit your source material to us for consideration, examination, or judgment, and this does not impose any liability on either you to pay or on us to provide our opinion. Normally, we are more than happy to give our judgment on your material and on how we can best produce the product. This is called the negotiation stage.
When you make a translation request, you are asked to provide all relevant information, such as target languages, deadlines, target audience, confidentiality level, glossaries, etc. This is so that we could treat your order accordingly and provide the service you need exactly as you need it. If some information is missing in your request (for example, no glossary attached), we will have to assume some default meaning (for example, no glossary required).
You are particularly asked to explain the purpose of your translation, which will not only help us ensure the product will meet your needs as closely as possible, but also help us stay away from violating the quite high standards of ethics that we adhere to at ClearEnglish.
Once we decide we are able to produce what you requested, we will send you an invoice, typically by email, which will detail the conditions we agreed upon (source material, volume, deadline, price, etc.) You are expected to review the invoice and, if you still accept its conditions, pay it. When you pay the invoice or otherwise indicate your agreement with its conditions, this becomes a contract between you and us. Now we are obliged to produce and deliver the product, while you are obliged to accept it per the invoice conditions when it is ready.
Payment
Normally, unless agreed otherwise, all orders are prepaid in full. For bigger orders, payment by installments may be arranged, which is when you pay for a milestone which is then done, and then for the next milestone, etc.
When you agree to order our service and pay for it, we normally start working on it immediately, and a short time later the bulk of work on a project may already have been done. With that in mind, it is not possible or practical to arrange any refund or compensation or chargeback for our services. The exchange you will get for your payment is the product you have ordered.
Full or partial refunds are only possible if we, after accepting an order from you, fail to produce or deliver the product. Also, we may, and at our sole discretion, consider making full or partial refund if we find ourselves to be unable to deliver a proper-quality product to you after we accepted an order, in which case it would be best to annul the order and refund the money paid for it.
Products
We undertake to do our best to deliver the product you requested. We apply our best judgment, measures, and criteria to determine what the best product would be for your project and how to best product it.
We provide our products on an as-is basis, which means we do not give any legal guarantee as to whether this product will be usable for any purpose, sellable in any way, or up to your or someone else’s expectations. The only guarantee of quality you have is our past results, history of cooperation, samples, certificates of our specialists, our goodwill and experience. This provision is solely there to avoid legal complications. In practice, we try to always satisfy our clients and will often go an extra mile, although this is not a legal obligation we take on but merely data from our experience.
Delivery
When we have finished producing a product, we will send it to you, normally by email. Please confirm its acceptance. In the event of any discrepancy, our internal mailing and statistical system is considered to have valid data as to when and how the product was sent to you, as third-party email and computer systems may have their own failures. You are very encouraged to stay in touch with us and request updated information on the progress or delivery of your orders.
Upon receiving a product, you are expected to review it and accept it, whereupon the project is considered to be done. However, if you have comments or corrections to be introduced, you are welcome to do so and we will consider whether we can and should introduce them as part of the same project or that will entail more work that should be covered by an extra fee.
Sometimes clients believe they or their editor or reviewer found some faults in our products. In this case, you are more than welcome to submit that to us, and it is best if such faults would be substantiated by reference to reliable sources, such as dictionaries, trustworthy materials, officially published documents, etc. We will consider your submissions and, if they are substantiated, decide on how to best correct the product.
Confidentiality
The bulk of orders we receive are not confidential in their nature, and we assume so by default. However, we are totally willing to commit to keeping your data confidential, including the materials, the order itself, or even your identity, if you just make it clear that this is what you want, and in such cases, we take measure to protect the confidentiality of your data submitted to us. Purely legally, we do not collect or keep your or anyone else’s private data, and we have no legal power or permission to do so. Please take this into consideration when you submit any data to us.
We have put together this version of Terms of Service to make it easier for both you and us to do business and get things done. We are not very much into bureaucracy or paperwork or legal complications. All we offer and all we want is friendly contact, smooth service, fast interaction, productive cooperation, your purposes achieved, and you being happy. If that is what you want, you are very welcome to contact us with a request or question. We look forward to hearing from you and hope to serve you above your expectations.