What should be the Priority for Legal Document Translation?

Legal firms that do business overseas usually find that they have to make use of legal document translation services quite often. Like many businesses, there is a constant push to reduce the cost of running the business, but there is that awareness that quality counts, too and there must be a trade-off between the accuracy of a translated document and how much it cost to produce it.

Legal documents are normally critical in terms of the information they convey and the translation services provider that is chosen to carry out the document translation has to have the expertise to produce very accurate results otherwise the consequences could be serious. The upshot of this is that legal document translation is likely to cost more than other types of document translation, even if these translations are done by the same provider.

There are a few ways in which a legal firm can cut down on costs without compromising on quality, but this depends partly on the choice of professional translation services. It’s more likely that the longer established and larger translation providers will have the sort of technology that helps to cut down on the time taken to complete a translation and therefore cut down the cost.

The two main translation aids are translation memory and glossaries. Not all translation providers make use of these features and they are not necessary to effect an accurate translation but they are just aids to speed up the process and are particularly useful once your legal firm has built up a longer term relationship with a translation company.

Translation memory (TM) is basically what the name suggests. The software programme “remembers” strings of words or phrases or even whole paragraphs that have already been translated before and will scan a document for text that it “remembers”. The text, if it exists in the new document, is then automatically translated. Not all documents which need to be translated will have repetitive text, but some certainly will and then the TM will save the translator time and your firm will benefit from the savings that are passed on.

Glossaries are a store of words that are commonly used and their translated equivalent.  Glossaries are not just there to help a legal document translator with legal terminology, but it also helps to ensure consistency. Quite often, if several people in a business are involved in international communication and require translated legal documents, the tendency is for the terms used being somewhat different. Glossaries are designed to prevent this sort of disparity, but normally glossary construction is a long term process and a good relationship between legal firm and translation agency is required.