Legal Translation: 7 Best Practices for Hiring a Firm

Legal translation is the translation of contracts, court filings, identity and status records, and other legal texts by translators who understand the legal systems of both languages.

The margin for error is zero: a mistranslated clause can change a party's rights or make a document unenforceable.

To hire a legal translation firm, look for legal subject-matter expertise, certified or sworn translators where the receiving authority requires them, strong confidentiality and security controls, a two-step review process, and experience with your target jurisdiction.

With some due diligence and an understanding of the legal translation process, finding a qualified, trustworthy legal translator to help you transact international business becomes much easier. This article outlines everything you should know about legal translation to help you make an informed choice:

• What is legal translation?
• What types of documents require legal translation?
• The importance of accuracy in legal translation
• What challenges does legal translation pose?
• The importance of confidentiality and security in legal translation
• Collaboration between legal experts and translators
• Best practices for selecting qualified legal translators

What is legal translation?

It requires a comprehensive understanding of the source material and expertise in the foreign language.

Requirements vary by country and authority; check with the receiving office before ordering a translation. 

Successful translation isn’t just about creating documents in a new language. It must capture the nuance of language in a legal context and provide accurate legal information for the target geographic location. Legal translation involves complex terminology and technical terms requiring a specialized translator to represent the source content accurately.

What types of documents require legal translation?

Documentation is the cornerstone of almost every legal proceeding. Legal documents may establish the parties' identity, interests in a business deal or transaction, rights under the law, or recourse in the event of default. For this reason, every document connected to a legal matter must be translated with a high degree of accuracy and integrity.

These documents commonly require translation:

• Identity documents such as licenses, birth certificates, adoption records, and name changes
• Status documents like marriage certificates, divorce decrees, litigation information, immigration or residency documents, travel documents, and correctional documents
• Transactional documents like deeds, purchase agreements, sales contracts, wills, trusts, and settlements.
• Evidentiary documents, such as police reports, witness statements, official testimony, and subpoenas.
• Financial documents like earnings statements, annual reports, tax returns, and certified financial statements
• Business documents, such as service contracts, formation and dissolution documents, partnership contracts, agency agreements, and non-disclosure agreements.

Any document required to establish a person or business’s identity, ownership, rights, or status in a legal matter should have accurate and complete translation to ensure smooth proceedings.

Why does accuracy matter in legal translation?

Accuracy matters in legal translation because a translated contract or filing must keep the same enforceability, intent, and legal effect as the original, and a single mistranslated term can create a loophole or void a clause.

Legal documents have consequences for everyone who interacts with them, including the concerned parties, law firms, and attorneys who use them. A legal document translation must be strictly accurate to uphold its integrity and enforceability.

• Enforceability: Legal documents are often binding instruments. Therefore, mistranslation or ambiguity can have severe consequences for all parties to the agreement. Incorrect translation may result in a litigant or party to a contract suffering a loss of rights or recourse.

• Intent: The translated document must accurately represent the intent of the original document. If the nuance of the source document is lost in the translation process, it may have implications for a transaction, create conflicts of interest, or introduce unintended loopholes.

• Legality: Translations that create ambiguity or fail to address statutory differences between the source document and the target geographic area may create legal jeopardy or invalidate the legal instrument. For instance, a document that outlines compensation not legal in the target location may render a contract void or require rewrites to remedy the issue.

• Liability: Inaccurate translations cause miscommunication between parties to a contract, leading to extra costs, court fees, or other penalties. Depending on translation issues in their documentation, these costs may become the financial and legal responsibility of one party.

What challenges does legal translation pose?

Every country has specific terminology and formatting requirements for legal documents. What is considered pro forma or boilerplate in one part of the world may require adjustments in the target geographic area. A legal translator must have an in-depth understanding of the customary terminology and structure of legal documents in the target area, and be able to create documents from the source material that satisfy all legal prerequisites and retain the intent and substance of the source.

Risk of ambiguity

Linguistic differences are a common challenge in professional legal translation. The structure of language is complex, country-specific, and sometimes idiosyncratic:

• Use of formal or gender-specific pronouns
• Superlatives and honorifics used in specific cultures or settings
• Word order conventions and variations in sentence structure
• Use of articles: English, Spanish, and French all use definite articles, but they differ in when they're required. Spanish, for instance, uses an article before many abstract and general nouns where English doesn't ("la justicia" vs. "justice"). 
• Grammatical gender, such as occurs in some romance languages like French
• Writing conventions like capitalization for nouns
• Text direction, for instance, left-to-right presentation of written English versus right-to-left in Arabic

Missing the context or specific language construction in a legal document can give rise to all types of issues and ambiguities in the final document. While these may seem trivial, they may have consequences for the enforceability of the document or the sensitivities of the parties involved in the legal matter.

Jurisdictional differences

Depending on the country where a legal document is created, there may be significant variations in the document’s language, structure, and conventions. 

Many legal concepts exist in one legal system but not another. Common-law terms such as "consideration" in contract law, or "trust," have no exact equivalent in many civil-law systems, so translators must explain or adapt the concept instead of translating the word.

Moreover, countries often have particular concepts or principles of law that must be carefully identified and addressed when dealing with a cross-border transaction. Regional differences also present challenges, as different jurisdictions often have different interpretations of standard terms. What might be considered acceptable in one region could be completely unacceptable in another.

Cultural nuances

Local customs and practices impact the language and terms of drafting a contract. The cultural nuance of a document is an essential aspect of professional translation, as it may introduce friction between the parties involved. For this reason, a legal translator should be fluent in both the source and target language and have a working knowledge of the legal language, conventions, and cultures participating in the legal matter.

Fraud

Sometimes, a party intends to have details “lost in translation.” A legal translator may encounter fraudulent documents such as birth certificates, marriage documents, testamentary documents like wills, or other fake legal documents meant to give an individual unlawful access to funds or entry to a foreign country. Certification confirms that a translation is accurate; it does not verify that the source document is genuine. Legal translators should flag suspected alterations or forgeries to the client rather than translate them without comment.

How do legal translators protect confidential documents? 

Legal documentation is often personal and confidential. The contents of a legal document may be sensitive or restricted by non-disclosure protections. 

Legal translators are typically bound by non-disclosure agreements and professional codes of ethics that require confidentiality. Choose a provider whose platform and processes are independently certified; Smartling, for example, holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications and is certified to ISO 17100 for translation services.

Confidentiality on the part of a translator is paramount to the business relationship. Translators often have access to proprietary information such as financial statements, intellectual property, trade secrets, or reputational information that could cause real-world harm if disclosed.

Secure communication is another critical component of legal document translation services. The translator should have the means to transmit documents, questions, information, and ancillary information with secure encryption.

Collaboration between legal experts and translators

The legal translator’s unspoken motto should be, “When in doubt, ask.” While translators may have in-depth knowledge of the legal conventions and linguistic nuance of each party’s respective locale, there is no substitute for the advice of a qualified legal professional in times of uncertainty.

Translators specializing in legal translation collaborate with legal experts to ensure the intent and enforceability of legal documents remain intact once the translation is complete. Legal review by an attorney authorized to practice in the target geographic area is the best way to ensure documents maintain their integrity and do the job they were created to perform.

What are the 7 best practices for hiring a legal translation firm?

1. Require legal specialization. Ask for translators with legal training or extensive legal translation experience in your document type.
2. Match the target jurisdiction. Choose linguists who know the legal system where the document will be used, not just the language.
3. Confirm certification needs up front. Ask the receiving authority whether it needs a certified or sworn translation, and make sure the firm can provide it.
4. Check confidentiality and security. Look for NDAs, access controls, and independent certifications such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
5. Insist on a two-step quality process. Translation plus independent review, and ideally a check by a lawyer for high-stakes documents.
6. Build a legal glossary. Agree on key terms (party names, defined terms) so they're translated the same way every time.
7. Ask about technology and turnaround. Translation memory and AI-assisted workflows with expert review can cut cost and time on long or repetitive documents.

Translate legal texts with Smartling—quality guaranteed

Smartling offers translation services for every application and need, from marketing and technical translation to certified legal translation projects. Smartling Translate is a proprietary translation application trusted by legal teams to create accurate translations of contracts, wills, identity documents, and more.

Smartling combines cutting-edge translation and security technology with industry-leading, certified, and native language translators to produce quality translations and secure handling of the most sensitive documents. Our translation services combine the best turnaround time and accuracy of AI-enhanced translation with the unmatched accuracy of highly qualified human translators.

To see what Smartling can do to empower your legal teams with safe, accurate, and trustworthy legal translation services, book a meeting with one of our translation services specialists.