Ivy Pires
Ivy Pires is a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker who translates Brazilian documents into English for US filings, and signs the Certificate of Accuracy on every one of them herself.
Six years of Brazilian documents
Ivy grew up in Brazil reading the documents she now translates. She has six years of certified document translation behind her, working in both directions: Brazilian cartório certidões, diplomas, and INSS records going into US filings, and American records going into Brazilian processes. She works in Brazilian Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese is the reference in everything she publishes.
The work is mostly the parts other people skip. The averbação on the back of a certidão that records a name change. The livro and folha numbers an officer cross-checks against the register. The older cartório cursive that stops a machine and most humans. If a word on a scan is genuinely unreadable, it is marked illegible rather than guessed at, which is the difference between a certification that is honest and one that is convenient.
What she signs, and what it commits her to
Every translation leaves with a Certificate of Accuracy signed in her own name. The wording tracks 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3), the federal rule that governs foreign-language documents filed with USCIS. That rule asks for two things: a full English translation, and the translator’s signed statement that the translation is complete and accurate and that they are competent to translate from the foreign language into English. It does not ask for notarization, and it does not ask for a credential.
That distinction matters and it is easy to get backwards. Certified in this context describes the translation, not the translator. There is no US government licence for translators, so nobody can hold one. What a signature does is put a named person on the record behind the accuracy of the document, which is why the name on the certificate is hers and not a company’s. The full rule is unpacked in USCIS translation requirements in plain English, and what a finished certificate looks like is on the annotated sample.
Published work
She compiled and maintains the Portuguese-English false friends list, a free reference of 803 verified word pairs that look alike across the two languages and mean different things. Each pair is glossed by hand with what the word actually means and the correct translation in both directions, and every one is checked against Priberam, Michaelis, Merriam-Webster, and Cambridge. It is the working trap database of a translation practice rather than a study aid, which is why the legal pairs are the largest category on it.
She also maintains the Brazilian document translation checklist, which answers what a given document needs for a given destination.
Languages
Portuguese (Brazilian, native) and English. She translates into English for US filings, and into Portuguese for documents heading into Brazilian processes.
Contact
Questions about a document, a source request, or a correction to the false-friends list all reach her the same way: the contact page, or WhatsApp. Corrections to the list are checked and credited.