Legal Translation Services by U.S.-Based Certified Translators
As your law firm launches yet another multilingual discovery in transnational litigation, or continues its patent prosecution work, or starts dealing with foreign-language taped-recorded evidence, you may be swamped by spam emails from Latin America, or China, or India, touting cheap and fast legal translations. The pushy overseas vendors may tempt you to look at legal translations as yet another commodity- such as toner cartridges, or tires. But is it really such a good idea? Consider this:
Offshore translators, who are native speakers of various foreign languages, are likely to be well-versed in Offshore English, also known as International English, also known as Global English, or World English. It is the “simplified” English, which uses a narrow core vocabulary.
Clearly, they may be able to translate a legal document from their native language into English. The kind of English, which is spoken and written by non-native speakers of English.
But can you risk receiving your legal translations in Spanglish, or Singlish, or Japlish? And what are the chances such translations will stand up in court?
Do you know, how many seemingly universal words are there in legal documents? Do you think that the non-native speakers, schooled in the “simplified” version of English, would have the skills to recognize such linguistic traps, or false cognates that look almost alike in their native language and in English, but have different legal connotation? For example, “notary public” (notario publico).
It helps to recognize that professional legal document translation takes skills well beyond knowing just two languages. It’s a highly specialized service, performed by professional human translators, and is not suitable for outsourcing overseas.
Rather than gamble with your law firm’s language translation needs, or rely on free automatic translation, or machine translation, or translation software, remember Mark Twain’s remark,
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
And start seriously looking for a legal translation company you can trust. Start looking for a provider of legal translation services, whose legal translators and court interpreters have “been there- done that”, whose work products- document translation and court interpreting– will stand up in court.
Contact our legal translation firm to retain bilingual licensed attorneys and/ or JDs, foreign language document reviewers and translators for Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish document reviews.