Legal Translations

Expert Legal Translation Services for Law Firms, Corporations, Government Agencies, and Individuals

Consumers, businesses, organizations and governments alike rely on faithful translations of contracts, court documents and legal documentation into/from foreign languages to protect and promote their interests. Given the critical nature of most legal documentation, excellence in legal translations is not an option, it is a must.

Why You Should Choose LanguageTran for Your Legal Translations:

- Our highly trained and experienced translators, including linguists with law degrees
- Strict confidentiality ensured by non-disclosure and non-compete agreements
- Guaranteed accuracy
- Quality assurance procedures consistently applied and regularly reviewed and updated
- Certified translations provided upon request (see below)
- Accessible and responsive customer service

The Importance of Specialization

Accurate legal translations can be delivered only by highly specialized legal translators with many years of training and experience.

Professional legal translation services provide the necessary expertise to translate international contracts and agreements, foreign law, court documentation and government regulations using specialized translators who have comprehensive knowledge of the legal systems involved as well as a command of legal terminology. Legal translators are highly specialized and often only translate legal documentation. In many cases they are attorneys themselves who have also been trained as legal translators.

Challenges of Legal Translations

Legal translations are often challenging. There are issues of equivalence, terminology, stylistic differences, and error and ambiguity in the source text.

Conceptual equivalence between the source and the target text is often not straight forward between two different languages and/or legal systems. It is common that exact equivalence does not exist. The skill and knowledge of the translator makes the difference between a deficient and a good translation. The translator must translate legal text that is clear and exact. For instance, many countries lack public jury “trial” processes. Instead, other judicial systems involve stages of evidence submittal, often in closed hearings, after which the court renders its verdict. In a situation such as this, a literal translation of the word "trial" might mislead the reader.

Legal terminology also requires the experience and knowledge of a professional translator, both in the source and target languages. Legal translators must be alert to the use of "false friends" of "false cognates." These are terms in the source language that closely resemble a similar sounding term in the target language. However, many times their meaning can be entirely different. Legal translators must avoid the complacency which leads to the use of false cognates.

Stylistic or repetition differences must also be reconciled when translating. In contractual documents, English legal tradition often stresses consistency through specific word repetition. The translator must handle repetitive terms in English that essentially have the same meaning. The same English term may be translated with varying equivalent terms to the target language and the legal translator must consider stylistic variations of the source and target languages.

Finally, in addition to the legal theory, cultural and linguistic differences described above, the translator often faces all-too-frequent ambiguities and errors in the source text. The translator often walks a fine line between incorporating obvious insignificant errors into the translation and pointing out every possible ambiguity in the source text.

To summarize, legal translations must reconcile the often competing goals of producing clear and readable documents that can be assimilated easily by the reader with the rendering of translations that faithfully transmit the form and substance of the source text. The constant tension between these two goals requires a great deal of experience, skill, perseverance, knowledge and integrity.

Certified vs. Non-Certified Translations

In the US a certified translation means that the legal translation service prints an affidavit and attaches it to a physical copy of the translated document attesting to the accuracy of the translation. The affidavit must be notarized to certify the document.

Country officials or institutions occasionally require official certified translations provided by legal translation services.

Other countries like  Mexico require that officially certified translators are the legal translators of record for official documentation. In such cases, LanguageTran can provide local certified and credentialed translators. Please contact us for availability.

Resource Articles on Legal Translations

Business With China? Don't Forget Your Qualifed Chinese Legal Translator

Legal Spanish Translators Play a Critical Role