Legal translation can be a fairly dry term for what is a complicated procedure of creative meeting technical. Legal issues can arise from incorrect term usage due to its ambiguity or perhaps by being too specific to not cover what is intended. Legal translation, then, is one of complexity that perhaps you believe is out of your budget.

Not necessarily. Legal translation is something that can benefit from a partial machine translation service due to the translation memory method for clever tools such as our Synergy X. This can lead to significant savings month on month if you have a repeat glossary of terms or key legal phrases.

Before we get to that, it is first key to address what legal translation is and how it works.

What is Legal Translation?

Legal translation does not apply only to the legal sector. Each company requires legal work, from employee contracts to branching out into new territories. All of these takes part in a language of its own – legalese, if you will.

That’s why all linguists need to be legal experts in designated fields. Not only that, the translator should be culturally aware to help avoid mistranslations or colloquial errors that can be more than a simple mistake, it can be a lawsuit, a loss in a case, a court delay or cause a huge contractual obligation that could cost thousands.

With experience in this area, this can be avoided due to understanding the delicate and sensitive nature of legal document translation as a service. If you know the importance of language in the legal sector, then your translator will be even more cautious when adapting to ensure that no clause, ambiguity or overt specificity remains.

Legal is a sector as well as something that is integrated into every industry – all of which have their own terminology. Like in translation, we talk about LSPs, transcreation and machine translation tools and much more, that’s our terminology.

If you work in manufacturing, then you may need instructions translated clearly to avoid any health and safety issues or even to finalise the finer points in contracts. Regardless, manufacturing has its own terminology and, the more niche you go, the more specific your terminology is to your own company.

As briefly mentioned in the intro of this article, legal translation can also benefit from a partial machine translation service due to the repetitive nature of the wording in contracts, which allows when matched with our smart translation technology tools, for great time and cost savings due to repetitions.

How Does Legal Translation Work?

You get the professionals we have stated before to work on it by mixing, you know it, creative and technical aspects of the documents. Translation is not as simple as putting one language into another; if you carry it over literally then you will lose flow, context and sometimes even sense.

Therefore, you need the creative side to recreate sentences with the legal equivalence and structure. Sometimes it the translator needs to put an appendix to go further into detail about the possible issues that may arise with this translation.

What is necessary for these translators who are industry experts is that they stay up to date in their respective fields. That’s why they should have access to important tools like legal dictionaries, online databases, libraries, journals and all the material that facilitates the translator, allowing them to remain on top of their game to deliver the best quality translation.

Don’t worry about your sensitive documents too. LSPs should all provide their services with security in mind; through extensive NDAs to protect your information to sophisticated cloud-based hosting so no files are stored locally to prevent leaking.

That is the abridged version of what legal translation requires and how it works. Of course, there is more to consider and it is not as complicated for the client as it is for the translators. All we need is an understanding of the requirements and an LSP will take away all the concerns that come with taking things across borders as multilingual experts.

What’s important to cover, and a good conversation to have with a knowledgeable account manager, is cost vs. quality. In an age where we’re all tightening budgets, it can feel out of reach to get it up to the quality you need but the experts can discuss it with you in length to provide you with a guide of what quality of legal translation that is best suited for yourselves.