What happens when part of the document is illegible or a signature is faded?

In-depth Answer

Professional ethics require the translator to render everything that is actually present and to add nothing.

Faced with a faded seal, unreadable handwriting, or a passage cropped by a bad scan, the standard practice is a square-bracketed note telling the reader that text exists there but cannot be read, with a short description such as round seal, illegible.

Such notes help an assessing officer more than a silent gap, because they show nothing was quietly omitted.

The better fix is upstream: if you still have access to the original, rescan it at high resolution in full colour, or request a fresh extract from the issuing office, and send that before work starts.

You then get a complete translation with no annotations hanging over it.

Related questions

• What file format and scan quality should I send the translator?
• Must handwriting, seals and signatures on a document be translated too?
• What if I find an error in the NAATI translation?