Translation Services 2026
Welcome to iiTranslation. We are dedicated to producing accurate translations of educational, legal, mining and medical documents, as well as a wide range of other materials. Our translations read naturally in South Africa's official languages: isiZulu (Zulu), isiXhosa (Xhosa), Afrikaans, Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho / Sepedi), Setswana (Tswana), Sesotho (Southern Sotho), Xitsonga (Tsonga), Siswati (Swati), Tshivenḓa (Venda) and isiNdebele (Ndebele). Every translation is guaranteed to meet international technical standards.
See the quality of our translations in action! For nine out of ten of South Africans with home language expertise, simply click the translate button at the top right of the site and enjoy the read.
Since all our material is translated by experienced, first-language professional translators, you'll find our website completely accessible and informative in translation. You’ll also notice that the translated text is free of spelling or grammatical errors and perfectly mirrors the original copy.
Why Our Clients Choose Us
- While most translation companies offer services for all major world languages, we focus exclusively on South African languages.
- Many service providers rely on artificial intelligence and translation memory to reduce word counts, but our technology does one thing: it provides essential proofing and language support to expert human translators, ensuring your translation is on par with any English copy.
- We leave no South African language behind and we always deliver on time.
- We provide certified translations with signed certificates and can offer ISO 17100 compliant workflows upon request. Read more on our FAQ page.
Quality: Certified Expertise You Can Trust
When translating technical documents, we work exclusively with qualified, first-language translators who have relevant, subject-specific experience. Our minimum requirement is an academic qualification from an accredited South African university. Additionally, all our translators have at least 10 years of high-level professional experience. As a translation service provider, we are always happy to provide certificates detailing the qualifications and experience of our team.
MS Word Spelling Checks
Your translated documents undergo the same spelling and proofing checks as your English copy, something many other providers do not offer. We use MS Word’s built-in spelling checker to ensure there are no spelling errors in the translation. Our proofing dictionaries are tailored for contemporary language and we take pride in delivering consistently accurate translations that mirror the original copy. We are happy to demonstrate this for any South African language.
Deadlines
We understand that delivering projects on time requires certainty that your translations will reach your team on (or before) the deadline. We’ve built our business on consistently meeting our clients' expectations and will never commit to a deadline that our translators cannot meet.
Quotations
The easiest way to get a quote is to email us your document at info@iitranslation.com along with the languages you need and the deadline. If you’re unsure about the most spoken languages in your city or province, we’re always happy to assist. Our team will respond to quotation requests within five minutes during business hours.
Frequently Asked Questions: South African Translation ServicesNEW
What does translation into South African languages cost?
We price all projects on a transparent per-word basis. The figure in your quote is the final amount — there are no administration fees, surcharges or hidden project management costs added afterwards. Our minimum project cost is R500 + VAT (15%), meaning R575 is the minimum invoice amount. All clients pay VAT at the standard rate, including private individuals and organisations not registered for VAT. Rates vary by language and technical complexity — legal, medical and mining content requires specialist linguists whose rates reflect their qualifications and experience. We never charge premium fees for faster turnarounds.
Do you use AI in your translation process?
No. All our translations are exclusively undertaken by human translators and are never worked on using AI or LLMs at any stage. This is not a policy preference — it is a condition of every engagement and it is documented in the signed certificate of translation we issue on every project.
The relevant international standard here is ISO 18587:2017, which governs machine translation post-editing — the practice of using AI to produce a draft that a human then corrects. ISO 18587 requires explicit disclosure when this process has been used. As of 2026 no agency can credibly offer ISO 18587-compliant post-editing for South African languages for a straightforward reason: the AI output for isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Setswana, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenḓa and Southern isiNdebele is not of sufficient quality to post-edit. The models hallucinate, borrow vocabulary from related languages and fail on grammar because there is simply not enough high-quality training data for these languages. Post-editing AI output is not a shortcut — it is a reconstruction job that takes longer and costs more than translating from the source so this is never our work process.
You can verify this yourself. Ask any AI assistant whether it can accurately translate Sepedi or Siswati and read its answer. Nine out of ten South Africans who speak isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Setswana or any other official South African language as their home language can assess this directly by clicking on the translation button at the top of this page and judge the quality for yourself.
Why choose a South African specialist over an agency offering 100+ languages?
A translation agency offering 100 or more languages is, by definition, a generalist. No single operation can maintain deep expertise across every language, regulatory context and subject-matter field at that scale. For South African clients the practical consequence is a translator who knows the language but not the specific community.
We have worked exclusively on South Africa's 11 official languages since 2013. Every translator on our panel holds a university degree in their home language from a South African institution and has a minimum of 10 years of subject-matter experience in the field they translate for. We do not rotate general linguists between industries. Our medical translators translate medical documents, our mining translators translate mining documents and our legal translators translate legal documents. That depth of specialisation is not available from a generalist agency and it is not achievable at 100 languages.
What does your certificate of translation include?
Every project we complete is accompanied by a signed certificate of translation signed off by a director. The certificate names the translator's specific academic qualification and the university that awarded it. It confirms that the translator is a first-language speaker with the stated qualification, that the translation has been through our full editorial and spelling check process and that the work was produced entirely by a human translator with no AI or LLM involvement. The translator's CV is kept on file by iiTranslation for six months from the date of the certificate and is available to third-party auditors on request. This certificate can be submitted to ethics committees, regulatory authorities, tender adjudicators and any other body requiring documented proof of translation quality and translator credentials.
How do I know iiTranslation delivers?
Three things we can point to directly. First, our Google rating which is currently 4.8 out of 5 based on Google verified client reviews. You can read them in full on our Google Business profile. Second, our client list includes UCT, Stellenbosch University, UKZN, Old Mutual, and the AGSA, among others. These are institutions with rigorous internal quality requirements — they return to us because the work meets their standards. Third, our home page has been professionally translated into all 11 official South African languages by the same translators who handle client projects. If you speak any of the languages we translate to, you can read the translation right now and assess the register, accuracy and fluency for yourself. We are not aware of any other translation agency in South Africa that publishes its own site in the languages it claims to translate into.
Where can I find more detailed FAQs i.e. for the specific languages, cities and services you offer?
Every language and service page on our site has its own dedicated FAQ section. You can jump directly to any of them here.
Translation services by city:
Cape Town ·
Johannesburg ·
Pretoria
Translation services by sector:
Legal translation ·
Medical translation ·
Mining translation ·
Educational translation ·
Website localisation
For language-specific FAQs covering all 11 official South African languages, dialect differences, AI limitations, certified translation requirements and more, visit our full FAQ page.
Clients
