Boston Herald - April 1, 2003
The increasing globalization of legal work has been nothing but good news for the budding number of translation companies making major dollars providing translators and interpreters for law firms.
"If anything, our work has been increasing, because law firms often need large documents translated very, very quickly, and that translation has to be perfect,'' said Liz Elting, chief executive of New York-based TransPerfect Translations.
Elting and her partner started their company in a New York University dorm room while earning MBAs in 1992. Just over 10 years later, TransPerfect boasts 14 U.S. offices - including one in Boston - and five abroad, she said.
The company, which like other translation firms works with all types of businesses, has been aggressively building its legal clientele in recent years.
While some law firms hire their own translators and interpreters, and some of the country's biggest firms even hire their own "translation coordinators'' to manage multilingual legal projects, Elting said many are more than willing to pay for near-immediate turnaround of complex legal documents.
Debevoise & Plimpton, involved in major litigation with one of Japan's biggest banks several years ago, hired 40 TransPerfect linguists to translate scores of legal documents from English to Japanese and from Japanese to English, Elting said.
The translators, who specialized in finance, worked at the firm's New York offices over 14 months. During that period, they were housed in a nearby hotel to ensure the job was done as quickly as possible, pushing the billable costs into the stratosphere.
Similarly, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a major corporate law shop, hired TransPerfect to translate more than 1 million Japanese words into English in just 10 days to meet a Federal Trade Commission deadline, Elting said.
More than 40 firms in Boston have used translation and interpretation services offered by TransPerfect and rivals. Goodwin Procter, for instance, has had documents translated from German and Hungarian into English, and Foley Hoag has sought Russian translations, Elting said.
The risks associated with a linguist misinterpreting a legal term in another language can be high - especially if a deal or a legal fight is based on a mistranslated document, Elting acknowledges. It's a risk that TransPerfect seeks to share with clients, while taking steps to avoid such problems.
To prevent mistakes, Elting said, an editor and a proofreader both review a linguist's finished translation before it is given to a client.
So far, so good, said Elting.
"In 10 years we've never been sued," Elting said.
—Maggie Mulvihill
About TransPerfect
With revenue of over $250 million, TransPerfect is the largest privately held language services provider in the world. From offices in 66 cities on 5 continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in over 100 languages to multinationals worldwide. With a global network of over 4,000 linguists and subject-area specialists, TransPerfect is the largest translation company to be fully ISO 9001:2008 and EN 15038:2006 certified. TransPerfect is headquartered in New York and has regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com.