Legal documents: the importance of a reliable translation

Nowadays, there is nothing that doesn’t go through the drafting of documentation: contracts, powers of attorney, articles of association, financial statements. Due to increasing globalisation and multilingualism, companies are increasingly willing to cooperate with foreign partners. This inevitably means the preparation of papers in two or more languages.

Even institutions and courts all over the world are compelled to draft their documents in different languages. For instance, in the case of the European court of justice, judgments, regulations and documents must be published in all the languages of the European community: 24 official languages!!

“Knowledge of law, indeed the law itself, requires language”. This means that language plays a fundamental function for the law: it is a “vehicle”, a means of transmission.

Consistency of meaning and continuity

From small businesses to larger entities such as courts, the aim is always to ensure accurate drafting of the translated document. A translation error, especially in the legal sphere, could have negative consequences. In the case of companies, the error could be caused by the non-understanding of a clause. As a result, there will be doubts about the interpretation of the document and an unintended disadvantage for the company. In the case of judgments of courts and tribunals or European directives and regulations, the responsibility is even higher as local courts are bound to transpose EU laws in their state.

How to deal with this problem?

During the translation process, the translator has to check the exact meaning of a concept to be translated from the source language in order to be able to look for a notion with a comparable meaning in the target language. Legal translation thus involves not only the translation of specific terms but also the translation of notions. This may be a problem because some concepts and notions may exist in one legal system but be missing in another: just think about the difference between civil-law and common-law legal systems.

The translator has a huge responsibility since he should consider various factors – such as the normative or informative function of the legal text – in order to produce a translation that has the same legal effects as the original text. To be successful, he must thus find out as much as possible about the legal system of the target language, be able to interpret the content of the original document and obviously………have a considerable thirst for knowledge. 😉

Sources:

Gerard-René De Groot, “Das Übersetzen juristischer Terminologie”, in Gerard-René De Groot, e Reiner Schulze (a cura di), Recht und Übersetzen, Baden, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999, p. 11.

Rodolfo Sacco, “Language and Law”, in Barbara Pozzo (a cura di), Ordinary Language and Legal Language, Milano, Giuffré editore, 2005, p. 2.