What is Legal Translation?

Legal translation is a very special subset of professional document translation. It is often confused with legal interpretation, which is a different service altogether – falling into the community interpreter circle. In an ideal scenario, you would have access to conference interpreters as legal interpreters, as well as legal translators, to handle the entirety of your legal document translation needs. 

In our recent post, Only Trust Legal Translations to Professional Linguists, we emphasized, “Legal translation is a highly specialized niche because it must hold space for both the legal system as well as the cultural construct in which the legal system is operating.”  

The legal field is one of the most specialized of all, handling a myriad of situations and using highly-specialized terminology. Even the most experienced of professional translators should never offer to serve as a legal translator if they aren’t native speakers of the target language (especially important when working from certified court interpretations to translations) and aren’t familiar with the relevant legal niche. 

Your company’s–, organization’s– and your personal reputation – not to mention the status of a pending case –depends on the uttermost accuracy and thoroughness of any legal translations used to support your cause.  

Professional translations span the gamut of documents, including: 

• Witness statements  

• Transcripts  
• Immigration documents  
• Identity documentation  
• Litigation papers  
• Official reports 

• Contracts and agreements  
• Wills and trusts  
• Articles of incorporation  
• File patents  
• Precedents and legal rulings 

When working with these documents, legal translators do much more than replace one word with another. Professional legal translations must: 

• Be 100% accurate 
• Precisely reflect a document’s words, emotions and nuances in another language 
• Flow naturally in that language 
• Transpose legal concepts and contexts 

• Translate the legal and cultural constructs and traditions from one language and culture to another 
• Reflect the legal genre or niche for which (and/or from which) the documents are used 
• Craft a final product that is “fit-for-purpose,” whether it’s a public document or one that is legally binding in the target language. 

Ultimately, legal translation is an incredibly intricate and intuitive task, which is why high-quality legal translators are worth their weight in linguistic gold.  

The legal translation team at Chang-Castillo and Associates (CCA) uses quality assurance process that takes place in three, separate levels – including an initial translation, a round of objective proofreading and editing, and then a third-go over to ensure the final legal translations are perfect and formatted correctly. One of our qualified project managers oversees the entire process.  

If your prospective legal translation team doesn’t honor a similar commitment and dedication to perfection, we suggest continuing the search to find professional legal translators who do. 

Choose a professional legal translator with ample industry experience 

Legal documentation is about as precise, exact and technical as translation assignments comes. It’s a challenging niche at its essence, and this challenge is compounded when multiple languages are involved. For this reason, we recommend you work with a language service firm that has legal industry expertise and the ability to pair you with exactly the right legal translator(s) for the job. 

The legal translators working for CCA have legal expertise and extensive experience translating legal documents. We work closely with your team to produce flawless translations of all legal documents. Our translators are also adept at assisting when you get predictably impossible requests from jurors, lawyers or others.  

For example, those who aren’t familiar with languages and linguistics may not understand “verbatim translations” of the court interpreter’s transcripts are rarely possible due to differences in grammar structures, variances in legal terminology between languages/cultures, and differences in countries’ legal system in general.  

What should you look for in a professional legal translator? 

As we emphasized above, legal translation is a specialized niche under the professional translation umbrella. Read, What Qualifications Should I Look for in a Translator…, to learn specifics about the translator qualifications that matter most.  

Typically, your quest begins with finding a reputable language services provider. 

Important qualifications your legal translators should have include: 

• Graduate-degrees from an accredited university from the linguistic industries most sought after programs 

• Legal industry expertise (preferably in the desired legal documentation genre or niche) 
• Ample and current experience (they should be working regularly on legal translations and have the references to prove it) 
• They regularly spend time traveling to, and living in, countries that speak their A, B and C working languages 
• They present themselves professionally 

The professional legal translators at CCA have all of the above qualifications and more. Contact us if you’re looking for legal translators you can trust to provide impeccable work. We have decades of linguistic experience in international law and look forward to showing you why our team is considered the platinum standard in the language services industry. 

The Difference Between an Interpreter and a Translator

While interpreters and translators both deal with converting languages into other languages, the main difference is that interpreters focus on spoken or sign language while translators focus on written language. Interpreters usually work in government, business and medical offices while translators often work from home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here are some other factors that distinguish interpreter and translator services.

Interpreter and Translator Work

If you need a translation in both directions, such as both English to Spanish and vice versa, then you are better off working with an interpreter, provided the work involves spoken language. By contrast, a translator usually only works in one direction. The American Translators Association, which represents both careers, indexes translators by “from” and “into” language categories. The industry also identifies “from” as “source language” and “into” as “target language.”

When you need to translate written text in both directions, you will most likely need two different translators. Traditionally, translators are most familiar with their native languages, unless they were raised to be bilingual or studied different languages intensely in college. Interpreters who work in courtrooms usually handle interpretation in both directions by themselves for all parties.

Modes of Interpretation

Interpretation is divided into various modes, such as consecutive interpreting, simultaneous interpreting and sight translation. Consecutive interpreting involves listening to a section of speech then giving an interpretation as the voices switch back and forth. Simultaneous interpreting occurs when an interpreter shadows a speaker and lags by a few seconds. Sight translation is used in a courtroom when an interpreter is asked to read a document to someone in a language they understand.

Skill and Education Level

It is rare that a professional handles both interpreting and translating jobs, although both fields require a deep knowledge and appreciation for language. Both translators and interpreters usually have at least Bachelor’s Degrees. The translator needs to be very familiar with the source language, its written grammar and the cultural characteristics of the region where the text came from. Translators also work with dictionaries and other reference tools to make sure that proper contexts are recognized in the target language.

The reason translators usually only translate documents into their own native languages is because even bilingual professionals have limitations of knowledge outside of their native languages. People who have only lived in one nation their whole lives usually do not have the ability to comprehend all the different nuances that exist in another culture without experiencing it themselves.

Interpreters, by contrast, must have the skill to understand both source and target languages well without the help of dictionaries. They must be extremely skilled at listening and have the ability to perform simultaneous interpreting. They need to be able to memorize words and translate them while listening to a speaker in real time. In other words, unlike translators, interpreters are required to do two things at once.

Public speaking skills are essential for interpreters, but not necessarily for translators. Adding to the complexity that interpreters face, they must have the skills to instantly interpret colloquial language and certain contexts that may not be readily understood through direct translation.

Choosing an Interpreter or Translator

Obviously, interpreters are not interchangeable with translators, so you need to ask the right questions when pursuing translation services. Make sure that interpreters have a command of both languages on an oral level and translators are at least experts in their native languages. Instead of assuming that a professional interpreter or translator will provide accurate translations, talk to their references and find out how well they understand both source and target languages.