Mistakes In Legal Translation Cost Businesses Big

 

Legal translation deals with critical issues in the legal sense. It can range from lawsuits and crime to significant business deals. These are all scenarios where the outcome can significantly impact the parties involved. High quality legal translations come with significant responsibility, especially where accurate translation is required in business deals. Therefore, mistakes in legal translation are unacceptable and costly when translating legal documents. This is because they could potentially cost businesses large amounts of money.

Since global business is mainstream, legal translations have become an integral part of the business. Massive amounts of money are on the line, with contracts becoming void due to mistakes in translation. Brands today need to deal with an entire collection of contracts. These contracts can be with employees, investors, partners, suppliers or partners. Any misinterpretations or mistakes in translation can result in lawsuits.

 

Examples of the importance of legal translation

One significant example of the importance of legal translations is South Korea-EU FTA deal. In 2011, South Korea failed to secure an FTA deal with the EU due to more than 207 mistakes in translation of the documents. This error was made when it attempted to secure an FTA deal with the United States. This goes to show the importance of high quality legal translations.

Another key example of mistakes in legal translation is terms and conditions. International businesses need to translate legal documents carefully. A mistake here could result in supplier issues, customer disputes and other operational problems. These problems can lead to drawn-out court causes that soon become expensive. The terms and conditions are created to protect businesses when they face legal disputes. Thus, contracts can become voided when you fail to translate legal documents properly and expenses run.

As such, it is important to employ professional translation services. High quality legal translations must use terms and conditions applicable to the target audience. They must be 100% accurate in all cases.

 

Mistakes in legal translation: steps to high quality legal translations

One might believe professional legal translation services are only necessary in the courtroom. However, that isn’t the case. Every business operating in foreign markets must rely on high quality legal translations to function. This enables them to remain compliant with the law and protect themselves from legal issues. In either case, mistakes in translation, especially business translation services could cause irreversible damage. You can avoid all of this by hiring professional legal translation services.

To this end, we have listed a few mistakes that businesses make when they translate legal documents. Highlighting them will help you avoid them when you assign your legal documents to professional translation services.

 

Seeing legal translation as the last step

Legal translation projects can be more cost-effective and manageable when you plan. This is especially true if the original documents are self-produced before translation. As such, you need first to standardise the language used and avoid any ambiguous terminology. Avoiding ambiguous terminology can help reduce the risk of complications down the line.

Legal translations are simply balancing making your documents easy to translate and keeping their intended meaning. For this reason, it is best to work with professional legal translation services as quickly as possible. They can help you create documents primed for translation. Additionally, they can provide a glossary of legal terms for future projects.

Speaking of future projects, very few businesses require legal translations just once. So, it makes sense to plan for the future by getting professional translation services from day one. This can help to speed up the translation process and reduce future costs. To this end, you require professional translation services you can trust.

Apart from creating glossaries, you need to create a style guide for legal translations. This ensures every document you make reads as if created from your organisation alone. The professional legal translation services you enlist should provide a translation memory. A translation memory is a database that stores your projects. It can help you save time when translating similar sections of text. These features are what good professional translation services should offer.

 

Using literal translation

Creating legal translations is all about finding the right legal knowledge from the translator. It is also about ensuring you have the right linguistic expertise. To avoid falling into literal translation traps, you need to hire professional legal translation services. Sometimes, a sentence directly translated into another language has a different meaning. This is particularly common with specific phrases and keywords. When conducting legal translations, you need to ensure you avoid these pitfalls.

 

Using unqualified business translation services

Going with the South Korea FTA deal example, you can see how important professional translation services are. A high standard of legal expertise and linguistics is necessary to deliver high quality legal translation. Law is an extremely difficult industry to translate for. And this is why you need the highest level of professional legal translation services.

Furthermore, you need business translation services with experience to translate legal documents. Law can be extremely broad, so you need to find the right legal field to translate legal documents. You will need professional legal translation services with corporate and labour law experience.

 

Using only machine translation

Machine translation has its advantages in some situations. One such situation isn’t to translate legal documents. Legal documents require high quality legal translation, with a clear level of understanding. This is why you will require business translation services. These services come with human linguistic experts that can cut through the nuance, delivering accurate legal translations.

 

Conclusion

Legal translations are perhaps one of the most demanding translation niches. Likewise, business translation services understand that the stakes are high. And mistakes in translation could result in high costs. The bare minimum should be 100% error-free translation projects when you hire business translation services. Nevertheless, you need to demand more than just the minimum. Professional legal translation services must understand your company’s voice. This means professional translation services have to understand your workflow. Doing this can help improve the effectiveness of future projects. It also helps to ensure that professional legal translation services don’t repeat the same mistakes.

 

Contact us for Professional Translation Services

Over the years, we have served many legal firms in the UK and abroad. Fortunately, we were able to work with extremely professional translators specialised in legal translations. And this is one reason our legal translation services have never been rejected. If you need to discuss your legal translation project, please contact us with your project details. Our team is ready to help you!