What is a Legal Translation?
Legal translation is a highly specialized field of translation that requires linguistic skills and legal expertise. Legal translation plays a crucial role in facilitating communication and understanding across linguistic and cultural barriers in various legal settings worldwide.
The legal translation process involves converting legal documents, contracts, and legal proceedings from one language to another while preserving the original meaning and preparing them for use in the target country after due diligence in language localization and compliance.
Accuracy and time sensitivity are critical factors in legal translation. A minor linguistic error can have significant legal consequences, which is why legal translation necessitates the use of certified legal linguists, attorney reviewers, and proofreaders. Our legal teams are empowered with cutting-edge language technology solutions which act as force multipliers accelerating speed to delivery and excellence in translation, while increasing security, reducing costs, and ease of coordination.
Our range of comprehensive legal language translation services and global capabilities include:
- Document Translation
- Interpretation
- Transcription
- Bilingual Review
Who needs Legal Translation services?
Legal translation services are required by law firms and corporate legal departments that involve parties from different linguistic backgrounds and jurisdictions. This includes:
Corporate Language Support: M&A due diligence, contracts and agreements, real estate leases, and internal communications.
Compliance Language Support: Employee training and e-learning courses, internal policies and handbooks, internal investigation and complaints, codes of ethics, and whistleblower hotlines.
Intellectual Property Language Support: Patent applications, EP Validation, PCT National Phase Filing, office actions, and prior art/abstracts.
Litigation Language Support: Discovery materials, trial transcripts, pleadings, and witness statements.
Why TransPerfect?
With over 100 offices worldwide and a global team of certified local-language legal experts proficient in over 170 languages, we deliver unmatched legal translations, secure technology solutions, centralized and managed services, and end-to-end litigation support. We've been providing legal services for almost 30 years, and we remain dedicated to our long-standing commitment to quality, speed, and knowledge.
Certified Legal Translators
With TLS, you have access to thousands of language and subject-area specialists, including linguists and interpreters with advanced degrees in relevant fields as well as a pool of attorney reviewers and proofreaders.
All our legal translators must pass a rigorous linguist certification through the TransPerfect Linguist Certification (TLC) program. The TLC certification program was introduced by TransPerfect and is the first comprehensive system to assess linguist skill in the areas that matter most to clients. The program was created to ensure that each project is handled by a professional linguist with expertise in the given discipline to produce only the highest quality legal translation. To maintain the highest quality standards, our certified legal translators must undergo ongoing education and continuous evaluation to remain certified.
In addition, TLS is certified to both ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 17100:2015.
Legal Localization Services
The TLS team has significant legal industry experience and understands the stringent local, state, federal, and foreign regulations governing legal translation. Our team comprises highly skilled native speakers who are well-versed in adapting content for different target markets through legal localization, ensuring cultural and linguistic accuracy.
Our legal translation experts quickly identify the language composition and technical requirements of your multilingual cases by using advanced technologies to:
- note subtle linguistic discrepancies,
- identify cultural nuances,
- flag potentially misleading search terms,
- steer OCR accuracy, and
- strategically implement human and machine solutions.
From technical patent translation for foreign filings to localization of training courses, privacy policies, and contracts for compliance, TLS supports all your legal translation and language services needs that need localization.
Quality Assurance in Legal Translation
Quality Assurance (QA) is in-built into your document right from the start through planning, documenting, and agreeing on the steps, rules, and guidelines that are necessary to ensure impeccable quality. As part of the Quality Check (QC) documents go through a series of linguistic reviews, proofreading, and adherence to local legal terminology and regulations. A documented QA plan prevents mitigated risks and saves you time and money.
In addition, TLS regularly hosts, processes, and reviews multi-language data sets. Our team of expert legal consultants and linguistic specialists carry out proprietary workflows, such as automatic language identification and deduplication, to maximize processing and review efficiencies when handling multi-language documents throughout the e-discovery process.
Confidentiality and Security
We take confidentiality and data security seriously, making sure your data remains protected throughout the entire translation process. Our team of certified legal linguists, attorneys, and proofreaders sign robust Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) that safeguard your sensitive information.
We are continuously updating our technology to defend against hacks and cyberattacks while upskilling our translators with the latest security measures. Advanced encryption, secure storage and file transfer protocols, and effective monitoring are part of our stringent business practices.
In addition, TLS maintains and enforces security policies to ensure compliance with all local, state, federal, and foreign courts, as well as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
