Two things are true at once, and the tension between them is where most people get stuck.
You choose what to submit. Nobody expects four years of messages. Selecting a date range, or the conversations that matter, is an ordinary evidentiary decision and it is yours — or your attorney's — to make.
But whatever you submit must be translated in full. Not summarised, not sampled, not the good parts.
So the question is not "how much of my chat history must I translate". It is "what am I submitting, and is the translation of that complete".
Why bulk is not strength
There is a persistent belief that more evidence is better evidence. For chat records it is usually the reverse.
A four-hundred-page dump of raw messages asks the reader to find the relationship in it. A curated thirty-page exhibit, in date order, with speakers identified and dates preserved, shows them. The second is more work to produce and considerably more persuasive.
Volume also creates its own problems: duplicated screenshots, overlapping date ranges, messages out of order, gaps that look like omissions rather than the ordinary result of a phone changing hands.
What selection is, and what it is not
Selecting a date range is not the same as selecting messages within it.
Choosing to submit January to June is a scope decision. Choosing to submit the warm messages from January to June and leave out an argument is a different act, and it invites exactly the question you do not want asked: what else was left out.
The defensible shape is a continuous range, complete within itself. If the range contains something unflattering, that is generally better than a gap where it was — real relationships contain arguments, and a record with none reads as curated.
Do screenshots count?
Yes, and for several apps they are the only option — there is nothing to export. What matters is that they are legible, that names and timestamps have not been cropped away, and that the same content is not repeated across overlapping images.
An export gives more where one exists: call events, exact ordering, message counts, and no risk of a screenshot boundary cutting a conversation in half. Both end up on the same timeline.
What this costs, and why the unit matters
Almost every translation provider prices per page and defines a page as 250 words. That is a sensible unit for a birth certificate and an absurd one for a conversation — a chat export has no pages, and screenshots produce a page count that reflects how you took the screenshots rather than how much was said.
At $19.99 a page, a hundred screenshots is $1,999 regardless of whether they contain a thousand words or ten thousand. Which is why we price a record rather than a page: one conversation, one price, whatever its length.
Sources
This is general information about how a record is produced, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. BonaFile is not a law firm and does not assess cases or predict outcomes.