Accurate legal translations can be delivered only by highly specialized legal translators with many years of training and experience.

 

The legal translations department of Aploq Translations provides only qualified experts to translate the following:

      
    -       business law (international contracts and agreements)

    -       criminal law (police reports, hearings, etc.)

    -       family law (divorce, alimony)

    -       civil law (contracts, agreements etc.)

    -       labour law (employment contracts etc.)

    -       court documentation and government regulations

    -       patents

    -       EU texts

 

 

Legal translators are highly specialized and often only translate legal documentation. In many cases they are attorneys themselves who have also been trained as legal translators.

Legal translations are often challenging. There are issues of equivalence, terminology, stylistic differences, and error and ambiguity in the source text.

Conceptual equivalence between the source and the target text is often not straight forward when dealing with two different languages and/or legal systems. It is common that exact equivalence does not exist. The skill and knowledge of the translator makes the difference between a deficient and a good translation. The translator must translate legal text that is clear and exact. For instance, many countries lack public jury “trial” processes. Instead, other judicial systems involve stages of evidence submittal, often in closed hearings, after which the court renders its verdict. In a situation such as this, a literal translation of the word "trial" might mislead the reader.

Legal terminology also requires the experience and knowledge of a professional translator, both in the source and target languages. Legal translators must be alert to the use of "false friends" or "false cognates." These are terms in the source language that closely resemble a similar sounding term in the target language. However, many times their meaning can be entirely different. Legal translators must avoid the complacency which leads to the use of false cognates.

Stylistic or repetition differences must also be reconciled when translating. In contractual documents, English legal tradition often stresses consistency through specific word repetition. The translator must handle repetitive terms in English that essentially have the same meaning. The same English term may be translated with varying equivalent terms to the target language and the legal translator must consider stylistic variations of the source and target languages.

Finally, in addition to the legal theory, cultural and linguistic differences described above, the translator often faces all-too-frequent ambiguities and errors in the source text. The translator often walks a fine line between incorporating obvious insignificant errors into the translation and pointing out every possible ambiguity in the source text.

To summarize, legal translations must reconcile the often competing goals of producing clear and readable documents that can be assimilated easily by the reader with the rendering of translations that faithfully transmit the form and substance of the source text. The constant tension between these two goals requires a great deal of experience, skill, perseverance, knowledge and integrity.