Nastaliq is not printed Arabic
Urdu is written in a Perso-Arabic script, read right to left, but the style used for Urdu is Nastaliq — a flowing, steeply sloped cursive in which letter forms change depending on their position in a word and where words sit on a descending diagonal.
This matters practically. Software that reads printed Arabic frequently cannot read handwritten Nastaliq at all, and a translator familiar with Arabic script is not automatically able to read Urdu handwriting. It is a distinct competence, and it is scarcer than the volume of Urdu documents would suggest.
A further difficulty: Urdu is commonly written without short vowel marks, so a reader supplies them from context. In ordinary prose this is unproblematic. In a proper name it is not — the same written form can correspond to several different names, and the correct reading depends on knowing which name was intended.
Send the passport page. For Urdu this is not merely helpful, it frequently resolves a genuine ambiguity in the source that no amount of care can resolve from the document alone.
The nikahnama
An Islamic marriage contract records more than the fact of marriage. It sets out contractual terms, commonly including mehr — an obligation from husband to wife — along with any conditions the parties agreed and the details of witnesses and the officiant.
Where this document reaches a foreign court, in a divorce or a financial dispute, those terms may be read as contractual obligations. They are therefore translated in full and precisely, not summarised as background to the fact of marriage. Rendering mehr loosely as “dowry” is actively misleading, since the two are different in direction and in legal character, and we render it with a note rather than a false equivalent.
Foreign authorities also vary in whether they accept a nikahnama alone or require a civil registration alongside. That is a question for them, and worth asking before you commission anything.
Older revenue and archival material
Urdu was an administrative language across much of northern India, and pre-Partition revenue records, court documents and land papers survive in it. These carry Persian-derived administrative vocabulary describing tenure, revenue categories and procedure, much of it obsolete in modern usage.
Families researching ancestral property or establishing descent encounter these documents regularly. They require a translator who reads the older administrative register, not merely contemporary Urdu, and they are slower work. We will tell you at the quoting stage if a document falls into this category rather than discovering it midway.
Layout and direction
Urdu runs right to left while English runs left to right, which means tabular documents have to be handled deliberately. Column order in the original is mirrored relative to English convention, and a translation that preserves visual position while reversing reading order confuses the reader.
We reproduce the table so that the correspondence between original and translation is unambiguous, and note the direction where it could be misread. Photograph pages flat and complete, including margins, since Nastaliq descenders frequently extend into them.