Every day, your law firm accepts, creates, and files countless legal documents. The bulk of this paperwork will be written in your native language, but it’s not unusual for an international law firm to encounter documents written in a language you don’t speak.
This alone may be reason enough to reach out to a legal translation service provider for assistance with these documents. But there are many other benefits to this partnership. Here’s when you should involve a legal translator:
You Need to Submit Documentation to Foreign Courts and Officials
As a lawyer, there are plenty of opportunities to work with international clients, courts, and other legal officials. And although English is often the lingua franca of the EU and other jurisdictions, it may not always be the working language for your next case.
The success of your litigation, arbitration, or mediation hinges on accuracy, even if you’re working in a foreign language. And while you may have bilingual lawyers on your team, they may only be able to share the gist of a document—not a word-for-word copy.
To ensure you don’t miss a single thing, make sure you work with a legal translation agency known for accurate and transparent services. These services should employ experienced legal translators that can convert any text from one language to another while retaining the exact meaning of the original.
To learn how these professionals handle international document translation, you can review the available legal document translation services in your area. It’s simple — to get started, just type in the following keywords into your browser: legal translation services near me.
Foreign Courts or Officials Require Certified Translations
Besides a legal translator’s proficiency in your target languages, they also add legitimacy to your document translation.
Certified legal translations undergo a more rigorous process than if you translated the documents yourself. It involves proofing from multiple linguists and legal experts to ensure the agency produces an accurate and true copy of the original.
Some agencies also provide notarisation, which confirms the identities of those who sign the translated document while reconfirming the document can be trusted.
While certification and notarisation add another layer of confidence in your translator, it may also be necessary. Many legal systems require both accreditations for specific paperwork, making your partnership with an agency even more crucial.
You Need to Analyze Sizeable Data Sets
The e-discovery process marks another moment when having a partnership with a legal translation service makes sense. Short for electronic discovery, e-discovery describes the collection and analysis of data taken from digital sources.
If you’re in the middle of the e-discovery process, you may be searching through the following sources to unearth valuable evidence:
- Emails
- Text messages
- External hard drives
- Instant messaging apps
- Memory sticks
- Blogs
- Corporate intranet platforms
- Computer documents
- Social media profiles
Considering people send more than 306 million emails and post 500 million tweets a day, these digital sources may include an exceedingly overwhelming amount of data, much of which may not be in your native language.
A legal translation service can streamline this process, regardless of how much data you have to sift through or the number of languages involved. They have access to sophisticated machine translation software that can crunch all of this information quickly.
Bottom Line:
The law is complicated enough. Don’t let foreign language e-discovery, certification, or international filings make matters worse. Find a reliable legal translation service provider to manage your translation requirements.
