How to Improve Legal Translations

By: Armando Riquier
Submitted: 2007-09-29 19:56:02
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Legal translation is the language conversion of texts within the field of law. As law is a culture dependent subject, legal translation is not an easy task. Only professional translators expert in legal translation should translate legal documents and scholarly writings. The mistranslation of a passage in a contract, could lead to lawsuits and loss of money.

So while doing any legal translation one should be very focused and concentrate on it. A legal translator should have a fine understanding and knowledge of the legal terms. He or she has to be very careful to avoid any sort of mistake and error.

Legal translations can be done in the following areas of:

  • Estate Planning, wills and trusts
  • Arbitration
  • Workers compensation
  • Litigation
  • Corporate Law
  • Tax law
  • Family law
  • Immigration law
  • International law
  • Insurance law
  • Labor and employment law
  • Real estate law

Following are some tips that should be kept in mind while doing legal translation:

1. The original material received should be minutely analyzed in order to determine its technical difficulty, volume and linguistic peculiarities.

2. The legal translator should have a rich vocabulary.

3. An unqualified foreign language translator can ruin a whole case. So one should be aware of this and should always hire a professional legal translator.

4. The translation should be done with the help of CAT (computer aided translation). This helps to improve turnarounds and make sure that the terminology and the stylistic coherence is maintained throughout the text.

5. A legal translator requires a sound knowledge in legal as well as cultural and linguistic fields.

6. There are separate areas of law within the legal field that require specific translation techniques. A legal translator should be well aware of this.

7. For an improved legal translation, a translator must not refer only to a monolingual legal dictionary but also study regarding the subject matter and should refer to a bilingual dictionary also.

8. The translator should use the words from the dictionary with proper vigilance.

9. Apart from the terminology the translator should also focus on important aspects like textual conventions in the source. In most of the case the languages are culture dependent and may not communicate to the people in the target culture. So the translator should find out language structures with the same expression as written in the source language.

10. The quality of the legal translation should be checked properly and a final strict check should be done to make sure that the process has been done in a correct manner and the translated documents are ready for the court proceedings or usage as a legal document.

All the above-mentioned tips are very helpful for improving the skills of legal translation. Practicing these tips will help you to minimize the number of mistakes and improve the standard of your writing.

A single mistake in a translated legal document may cost a fortune to the client. Hence considering the severe challenge the job entails, even someone who is recognized as an expert in this field for a long time, should never neglect the task. Rather he or she should work on it very carefully and continuously seek to improve upon his translation skills.

Armando Riquier is a freelance writer and expert translator collaborating with the Tectrad group, a professional services agency specialized in the translation of financial, legal and corporate matters, as well as website localizations. Reach out to potentially millions more of customers and increase your sales with quality professional translation services of your documents.

Article source: Expert Articles

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