| Hindi confused with Urdu | Almost identical spoken, completely different written: Hindi in Devanagari with a Sanskrit vocabulary, Urdu in Nastaliq with a Persian-Arabic one. Mix them and you match neither the script nor the register the receiving office expects. | Target language (Hindi vs Urdu) and register are settled before we start; for Urdu we assign dedicated native translators. |
| Lakh/Crore number grouping | In the Indian system 5,00,000 means five Lakh = 500,000 (grouped 3-2-2), not 500. Read the commas as thousands and you are wrong by orders of magnitude — fatal in contracts, statements and inheritance records. | Amounts are converted to the German convention (thousands separator, decimal comma) and checked digit by digit; Lakh/Crore are written out, not copied character-for-character. |
| Name romanisation: passport vs schwa deletion | Devanagari has no case and marks vowel length with matra signs; the inherent schwa is often dropped, so राम is Ram, not Rama, and राज may be Raj or Raaj. A different spelling makes certificate and ID diverge. | Every name is romanised by a fixed scheme (IAST / passport) with the schwa-deletion rules applied, and matched exactly to passport, visa and existing documents. |
| Nasal marks swapped (ं / ँ) | Anusvara and Chandrabindu distinguish words: हंस (swan) versus हँस (to laugh). A missing or wrong nasal dot turns one word into another — meaning-changing in names and terms. | Nasalisation is set character-exact and checked; critical words and proper names are verified against the source. |
| Grammatical gender concord ignored | Gender inflects verbs and adjectives: "I went" is मैं गया for a man, मैं गई for a woman. Wrong gender in a declaration or certificate gives an amateur translation away at once. | Native speakers carry gender concord through the whole text and reconcile it with the person's details in the document. |
| Level of politeness wrong | Hindi distinguishes आप (respectful), तुम (familiar) and तू (intimate/dismissive). In a cover letter or contract the wrong level reads as presumptuous or improperly casual. | The register is fixed by document type and recipient and kept consistent — official and business texts normally use आप. |
| Devanagari digits carried over 1:1 | Amounts, file numbers and dates often use Indian digits (०=0, १=1, २=2). Left standing or misread, the sum, reference number or date no longer matches. | Digits, amounts and reference numbers are transferred unambiguously into the target digits and checked against the original. |
| Regional language mistaken for Hindi | Marathi, Nepali and others also use Devanagari and look Hindi to an outsider. Treat a regional-language document as Hindi and the terminology and forms are simply wrong. | We confirm the source language first and, where it is not Hindi, assign the right specialist rather than guessing from the script. |
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