No card needed

Try your first document for free.

For expats, travellers and anyone facing foreign paperwork

Official documents, finally understood.

Snap a photo of any letter. Get a full translation, know in seconds if it's urgent, and what to do next.

Create a free account. Your first document gets analyzed, and the Pros Guide, your first title in Guides for Spain, is yours to download.

We analyze, you download, nothing is kept.

The Guides for Spain pack: The Pros Guide on a tablet, The Sender Guide and sample pages in print. Badge: Free guide.

The same letter, before and after.

A municipal notification in Spanish, and the report it becomes.

Drag to reveal

Original foreign-language letter
What Does This Say? document report
BeforeAfter

HOW IT WORKS

Three answers, in the order you need them.

01

Read it properly

A complete translation of the document, alongside a plain-words summary that drops the administrative and legal jargon. Nothing is skipped and nothing is paraphrased away.

Read it properly

Translation plus explanation, side by side.

Know whether it's urgent

Deadlines lifted out of the small print.

02

Know whether it's urgent

Every document is given a clear urgency reading, with any deadline pulled out of the fine print and placed where you cannot miss it. Most letters are routine. The ones that are not, you'll know immediately.

03

Know what to do next

Numbered steps in the order they should be taken, and where a response is required, a ready-to-send reply drafted in the document's language — with a translation of what it says, so you never send something you don't understand.

Know what to do next

Steps you can follow, and a reply you can send.

Portrait of Pablo, the founder of What Does This Say?

I speak Spanish. That wasn't the problem.

I once had an empadronamiento request (my local town hall registration) turned down. Not for lack of Spanish: I hadn't sent the right documents, and I hadn't understood the agent's notes explaining why. I built this tool for the version of me who read every word — and still got it wrong.

Pablo, founder.

Your document does not stay with us.

Official letters contain your name, your address, your case numbers. We built this on the assumption that you'd rather we didn't keep any of it.

Nothing is written to our database

Your document and its report are held only for as long as the analysis takes. When you close the page, there is nothing left on our side to leak, subpoena or sell.

You download, we discard

The report is yours to save. We do not keep an archive of your documents and there is no history page listing what you have uploaded.

No human reads your letter

The analysis is automated. Your document is not reviewed, annotated or sampled by staff.

Never sold, never used for advertising

Your documents are not shared with third parties for marketing, profiling or any purpose other than producing your report.

What you get.

The complete translation, every word. Certified human translation runs $25 to $60 a page. This is included, no extra charge.

What it actually means, in plain English. No legal dictionary. No guessing what a clause requires.

Color-coded urgency, so you see the stakes at a glance. One glance tells you if it can wait until tomorrow.

Every deadline, pulled from the fine print and dated. No hunting through paragraphs to find the date that matters.

Your next steps, laid out in order. No wondering where to start, or what step one even is.

A ready-to-send reply, in the right language — already written. No blank page. No bilingual friend to track down.

What this is NOT

It matters more that you trust this than that you buy it, so here are the limits, stated plainly.

This is not a certified or sworn translation. If an authority requires an official translation, you will still need a sworn translator.

This is not legal advice and we are not your lawyer.

What it will tell you is whether the document is the kind that needs one — which is usually the question you actually have.

One payment. No subscription.

Your first document is free, so you can see the output before you decide.

$27

one-time, full access

  • First document analysed free

  • Full translation and plain-words explanation

  • Urgency reading with deadlines highlighted

  • Next steps and a suggested reply

  • No recurring charge, ever

Fair use: up to 100 documents a month.

The price stays. The product keeps growing. Everything we add stays inside your $27 — Guides for Spain included.

Some letters need a person, not just an explanation.

The Pros Guide is part of Guides for Spain, for the paperwork that comes with living in Spain. It names nine professionals you might run into there, in plain language: what each one actually handles, the exact signal that means it's time to call them, and a relative sense of cost, low to high, so a quote is never a surprise.

Some letters need a person, not just an explanation.

$10

PDF, 18 pages, free.