Legal Document Translation Services for Law Firms
Is your law firm or legal department working with a professional document translation service? Will the translated documents stand up in court? Have you made sure that your evidentiary documents are being translated professionally, or are they riddled with mistranslations and inconsistencies? Are your attorneys relying on automatic translation, or translation software, or on their own bilingual skills? Or are you working with a professional patent translation service and legal document translation service?
Many law firms often suffer from the common misconception that any individual who speaks a foreign language is automatically a translator. Just because your college friend grew up speaking Italian doesn’t mean he’d be a good document translator.
Legal Translators and Court Interpreters.
There are two categories of language experts, whose services are very important in the everyday practice of law.
The language interpreter‘s job is to interpret orally from one language to another everything that is said, preserving the tone and style of the original statement.
Translators deal with written materials, taking into account various language and terminology issues and the context.
Legal document translation, in fact, is a very specialized field. Professional legal translations are produced by highly skilled individuals, who are deeply rooted in both the source and the target cultures, and who are intimately familiar with both the language and the legal lingo.
On the other hand, non-native speakers, as well as amateur translators, can easily miss a word’s context-specific meaning. In a product liability case, for example, incorrect translation of the French word imputabilite can turn “imputability assessments” (correct translation) into “causality assessments” (incorrect translation), as reported in Drug and Device Law Blog.
Contact our legal translation firm to retain bilingual licensed attorneys and/ or JDs, foreign language document reviewers and translators specializing in Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew and other language document translations.