Hi,
I just have a few questions to ask because I have been told so many different things from student finance staff on the phone and through twitter.
So I went to Japan last year and I sent my receipts and claim form to student finance and after a few weeks they emailed me to say that my receipts need to be translated by a certified service how ever when I called student finance to ask them about this and I asked if I could get my Japanese teacher to do it they said I could, but then I messaged on twitter and they said I couldn't. So then I spoke to a person I know who went to Japan the year before me how he did it, and he told me he just scanned all his receipts and added up the yen and converted it to pounds using XE.com for the exchange rate and put the date he did it on and it was accepted without translating it. So I'm just a bit angry because I got a quote from a translation service online which they told me to use and it came up to £500 which is half the money I'm claiming already, so ridiculous. And when I called prior to sending my claim form in, student finance told me I didn't need to convert the money and that they will do it for me, so when I sent mine in I just added up the yen and highlighted the prices on each receipt.
Someone help me because I can't afford to pay £500 for translation, and it's unfair that the person I know didn't need to do this and it got accepted.