As a business becomes global, this growth is met with challenges. These include the need for specific documents such as agreements between parties and contracts to be used across borders. In such cases, when both countries involved don’t speak the same language, legal translation services are necessary. This ensures that these documents have legal validation in the origin and targeted countries.
Hiring a trusted legal translation service will ensure accuracy during translation, and this can be the gap between failure and success in your project.
What does Legal Translation mean?
Legal translation service is a multifaceted service because every country’s judicial system is different from each other in many aspects. In addition, every country has its laws and processes of interpreting the law. Because of this, a qualified legal translator ought to have extensive and in-depth knowledge of the legal system of the targeted country. This is necessary to ensure that the criteria of the targeted legal system are fulfilled.
The legal translators are language professionals and experts in the legal field. An excellent legal translator should be:
- A native speaker of the language you want to translate the content of your legal documents to
- Familiar with the legal system of the country you want the content translated into
- A certified officer of the court
- A legal expert in the relevant field
Anything short of the above criteria, and you should consider getting a more qualified legal translation service. This can make all the difference in how content is translated and the effectiveness of your lawsuit.
What Constitutes Legal Translation Service?
A trusted legal translation service should be able to do all of the following services:
- Court interpreting
- Guaranteed USCIS accepted translations
- Translation of legal documents
- Translation of affidavits
- Compliance with school requirements
- Translations of civil lawsuits
- Translations of legally-binding contracts
Retaining Legal Translation Services
Some legal translation services have a retainer program that enables their client to have easy access to their language professionals. Others work on a project-by-project basis. Regardless of which service you select, these experts can adapt your legal documents to any desired language you are targeting. Through this retainer program, you can foster a good relationship with the legal translation company of the languages.
Maintaining the same translator can help you achieve consistency in all your documents. This can be very helpful when several words can mean the same thing. This is one of those instances where a human translator is preferable to machine translation. A human translator, especially one you’ve previously worked with, can be familiar with how you prefer your formatting and lingo and help you achieve this uniformity across all your legal documents.
Multilingual Translations of Legal Documents
As mentioned earlier, laws vary across countries, and inaccurate adaptation or translation of legal content can lead to legal issues and lawsuits when exchanging legal documents and contract negotiations. Legal document translation involves a very high level of technical expertise and precision because you have to define the obligations and rights of the parties involved correctly.
In the translation of legal documents, being a language expert in both the origin and target language isn’t enough. It’s equally crucial that the translator is familiar with the legal terminologies of the origin country and target country to avoid even the tiniest bit of legal misinterpretation.
Legal Translation and Machine Translation
Generally, machine translation works better with highly structured content such as internal communication, technical documentation, and legal documentation. Machine translation is particularly helpful in the electronic discovery of keywords for your case. Using machine translation will not only save a lot of cost, but it will save time for lawyers and attorneys to properly work on your case.