From commercial contracts to employment documents, to applications for public usa number list licenses. Legal translation is a complex type of translation that cannot be done lightly. Therefore, these translations must be carried out by professionals, since any error can have legal consequences. Having an expert and trustworthy legal translator is of the utmost importance.
We tell you what the most common errors are in legal translations and the importance of surrounding yourself with professionals to carry out these tasks.
Most common mistakes
If your company needs a legal document translated, it is very important that the translator has in-depth knowledge of the legal system of both the country of origin and the country of destination of the documentation. This is crucial to ensure that the translation is as accurate as possible.
Translation involves linguistic decoding as well as conceptual decoding. It is therefore essential that the translator has a thorough knowledge of the judicial system both in the country of origin of the documents to be translated and in the target country. The structure of the judicial system can be very different between countries and there may not even be direct equivalents. For example, two countries such as England and the United States share the same language and also the name for a judicial body, the High Court , but be careful, with very different powers and functions in both countries.
Or in the case of the Spanish social courts, they share similarities in terms of jurisdiction with the Conseils de prud'hommes and the tribunaux des affaires de sécurité sociale of France, but there are more differences than similarities that unite them. Therefore, an explanatory and not a literal translation should be applied.
Acronyms and abbreviations
In Anglo-Saxon law, it is very common to incorporate acronyms and this can create errors in legal translation. In these cases, the translator's job is to carry out research to find the meaning and thus transmit it in Spanish.
For example, NDA ( Non Disclosure Agreement ) means Confidentiality Agreement; ADR ( Alternative Dispute Resolution) would be translated as alternative methods of conflict resolution.
It is important that the legal translator you hire knows how to carry out this research and how to resolve the acronyms or initials that they encounter.
False friends
False friends are very common when translating any document, especially in the world of legal translation.