A certified translation is accompanied by a signed statement attesting that the rendering is complete and accurate to the best of the translator’s ability. This is what immigration authorities, courts, universities and licensing boards generally require, and on its own it satisfies most of them.
Notarization is a different act entirely: a notary public witnesses the translator’s signature on the certification and confirms identity, and says nothing about whether the translation itself is accurate. Some institutions ask for both. We provide notarization on request once the certification is signed, and we will tell you plainly if the institution you named typically only asks for one.
Machine translation cannot do either. It does not certify anything, and for official documents it quietly mistranslates the details that matter most - names, dates, official titles, institution-specific terms - in ways that are easy to miss and expensive to discover after a filing is rejected and has to be redone on a new deadline. For getting the gist of an email, machine translation is genuinely fine. For a document an official will rely on, it is not.
