Transhorsa

This article firstly explains the importance of legal document translation in nowadays world, then provides two fundamental principles of qualified legal translation with the specific examples.

After china entered the “WTO” successfully, the domestic market presents the unprecedented translation demands and serious emphasis on legal document translation. Along with the trend of globalization and the increase of cross-cultural exchanges, translators have already been aware of the importance of legal translation study. The legal translation tends no longer to be regarded as a linguistic code conversion process, but a legal mechanism in the act of communication.

The law is a kind of social norm, it is enacted or approved by the government or other authorities and people in that particular country or area must obey. Therefore, the legal language as a carrier of the law rules is broad and complex and it also possesses the professional and standard characteristics for legal context. A success legal document translation requests the translator not only to grasp the meaning of the original text, but also to understand what the legal effect will be performed from the original text. However, the legal translation so far mostly focuses on the settlement of a single word of the sentence-level practical translation skill, rarely seen on systemic and synthesis aspects as well as theoretical basis and legal practices.

Frankly speaking, on the way of legal document translation I am still in a research process herein is only some summary on the basis of reading a lot of legal translations:

1.    The accuracy of vocabulary, semantics, and syntax

As a special text translation, legal vocabulary has its own features, such as frequent use of archaism and the loanwords; the word usage is serious and standard; the ordinary word has the special legal meanings; the use of doubling word or near-synonym pairs and repeated structure; the long sentence, complex sentence on the high side. Let’s see an example:

Translation 1: Parties shall adhere to the principle of honesty and trust worthiness in exercising their rights and performing their obligations.

In this translation version, we can see the twice use of the word “their”, this situation in the legal translation is extremely rare. The legal language should avoid using the indefinite pronoun. Therefore, should obliterate “their” and instead of “thereof” as  legal expression.  See its revision in Translation 2.

Translation 2: The parties to the contract shall, in accordance with the principle of good faith, execute the rights and perform the obligations thereof.

2.    Faithful and rigorous; standard and smooth

As law text is born of high degree seriousness, the legal translation must be loyal to the original content, at the same time make the translation to be smooth and conformable to the legal tongue style. Therefore, in my view, “faithful and rigorous, standard and smooth” is very important. The ideal legal translation should be the perfect combination of both above. Here are two examples:

Translation 1: After a contract goes into effect, the parties may reach a supplementary agreement on items that have not been included or are not explicitly in the contract, such as quality, price or remuneration, place for performance and other matters;

The meaning of “a supplementary agreement” is not definite.

Although “that have not been included” is a restrictive attributive clause, it still doesn’t explain what it contains in.

“Such as”causes the sentence to appear insufficiently strict, and the meaning between translation version and original text has the significant difference.

The revision sees the translation 2.

Translation 2: If, after the contract made by and between the parties becomes effective, there is no agreement therein on the terms and provisions regarding quality, price or remuneration and place of performance, etc. or such agreements are unclear, the parties may, through consultation, agree upon supplementary terms and provisions;

As the legal translation’s uniqueness, it is not only required for the translator to have a superb translation skill, but also to have good sense of legal articles. Absence of these two premises, the quality of legal document translation can not be guaranteed.

Case Study legal document translation, legal translation, translation documents

 Once translation is considered as a kind of business, the force of commercialization will show its prowess in many ways. Translation quality has now become a hot topic. In this paper we will first cast a sight on real problems that determine the translation quality in today’s translation industry. The ISO9000 and 14000 quality standards are recommended and regulation of the translation industry needs to be launched forcefully. Finally, some personal viewpoints are suggested to formulate guidelines for translation services.

English has always been the international language as an information vehicle despite the world language had been formulated for decades. Now the translation market is broadening its horizon at an amazing speed, bringing about more opportunities as well as generating more challenges like any other booming industry. At present, the gross global translation production has reached over $13 billion dollars annually. The translation industry therefore can be called one of the hottest industries in the world.

It is ideal for any customer that the price and the quality could go with a cost- effective principle and the translation process could be an automatic plug-in one in a shortest waiting time. But the human translation working is under such a high pressure that it becomes so dear resulting in high quality. Early in the 1990’s, Lixianlin, a linguistic master deemed the translation crises are caused by many reasons; one of the most important was the increasingly declined translation quality. It is undoubted that the translation quality is a problem that we can not obviate any more.

When a translation work piece appears below the normal standard, the first idea strikes our mind is the translator is lack of required certificate or the ability of understanding a foreign language instead of pondering over something deeper.

In the second, the inadequate sense of social responsibility makes the poor translation quality. The translator should place the customers’ benefit above anything else. For example the overseas market effects of the products to be introduced in a language which is popular in the target area are largely determined by the translation quality. This is what translators or translation houses should make clear. Furthermore, a few translation companies run their business under such a situation in which the project manager himself is a layman in translation supervision!

The translation industry guideline has not been imposed to be executed by all translation service body and some illegal behaviors such as deceiving and big quote difference are making wormy sores in this industry structure, which makes the industry standardization rushing. Some ratfinks assign the projects they get and have no mind to pay for their contemporarily employed translators’ work. Some translation companies quote the lowest one can’t imagine in order to grab large amount of deals. After getting

They either employ unqualified translators or dissect the whole manuscript into small paragraphs of hundreds of word and get the free translation from hundreds of different translators in the guise for a trial. At last the customer becomes the biggest victim.

Translation Trend legal document translation, multilingual DTP services, multilingual manual translation, multilingual translation, professional translation team, translation outsourcing

Let me suppose a little scenario for you: at a weekend, you and your family are waiting for the reserved dinner in an exotic restaurant. You wish a delicious well balanced family meal after a week’s hard working could be a good payoff, so you have informed the restaurant manager, a trustworthy looking man with courteous smile, to prepare it carefully and you have paid for the bill on Wednesday. However what happened in the hours coming annoyed you a lot for the delayed serving and watery flavor. It’s nothing but your fault judgment caused the waste of money and time. It may impair your enthusiasm on your following work.

Who is to blame in the case? It depends on how you look at things. Surely, we have thousands of words to decry the greedy manager who took the third rate material to muddle through the first rate price. The profit with the largest margin drives him to do the stupid thing! On the other hand, the head of the household really need to be interrogated: is it the right way to show you are generous?

It reminds me of some translation projects few of the world class companies bought recently (the news resource: Go Translators: www.gotranslators.com- blacklist). The blockbusters such as HONDA and HYUNDAI entrusted big translation projects of hundreds of thousand words to an Indian company named MORPHEUS TRAVEL & LANGUAGES Pvt. Lt with a reasonable price, as well as gave them ample time in order that they can get an ideal version. However, things went opposite direction. The reasonable price and the relative more flexible deadline were abused as an opportunity of their nasty cheat—— they never and will never allocate the translation tasks to the proper translators as they advertised, instead they sold the projects to another translation group to get a pile of commission. The best result under such a situation for the customer is the project stops being auctioned by now and the second hand company deploys the translation process immediately; I have met with such situation several times especially run into a few famous brands such as HP and Honda. The worst situation is their projects are always sold by brokers who will pay few for the assigned team work. What a pity! Is profit an over wrapped chocolate? We always have to strip it till the naked candy merges. It’s easy for anyone to imagine the translation quality the customer will obtain. That’s why big company is more likely to be the biggest victim of such ugly phenomenon.

An unwanted supper may cost you only few hundred dollars and few days upset but who can exactly tell me the unwanted translation costs what? The likewise situation urges us again: we are still bad at factoring in good and bad possibility in choosing dinner service as well as translation service. This isn’t whistleblowing we are talking about. It’s old-fashioned dealing for the same reason they deal, because they can obtain huge profits without even touching the translated text a minute, and the translator team couldn’t get even a penny for their effort on the huge projects of hundreds of thousands of words.

What is to be done with such fraudulence? Shall we forgo the next co-operation with them or to expose in the media or to be more prudent with next target?

I say yes. All of the above.  And immediately too.  

Industry News huge project translation, legal document translation, translation outsourcing

Many methods have been released for a wide variety of managing a translation project. But some essential tactics have been hidden behind those articles that are published free on the Internet. These tactics include project definition, translator selection, professional proofreading and quality review. The problem is how we can use these steps to assure the quality of the final translation? As for the requirement definition to a project, we should learn the writing style of the original text, special terminology and the target market the translation is used for. Terminology is a direct characteristic for the audience to get the first expression. Grammatical correction is just a normal criterion for a quality translation. Words in a language are active in real life and business practice. Many words don’t mean their meanings in a dictionary. There are many extended and even implicative meanings for active words in language practice. Only a native translator or one who have lived in a mother tongue country for a long time can grasp these meanings except for technical document translations. For technical translation, the key is to choose an expert in the technical industry concerned. He has gone through many projects on the process of either management or technical direction. He knows how the technical process works and avoids misunderstanding the details of the translation contents. Terminology in technical fields (including social science) is standardized in language practice and is used in the most common ways. The important core for the quality management is to keep glossaries updated in related fields in comparatively real time with the development of project accumulated. A good translator may not be a good proofreader. For good translators, the important thing for him/her is to catch the stream meanings of sensitive sentences and rewrite them in an understandable and fluent way and this also demands the written sentences to reflect the original style even of very national characteristic. For example, “Fuwa” is the final name of Olympic mascot for Beijing Olympic Games. It means a mascot doll for 5 kinds of happiness according to the traditional social conventions. It is got by Chinese Pinyin Romanization, which reflects the origin and expresses the original pronunciation.

A quality review always needs a professional who has the ability to inspect the translation. Perhaps he is not a perfect translator, but he can examine the fluency of sentences and the terminology accuracy and the final writing style suitable to the original text. These items require much more ability of language utility and carefulness for the details in the translation. A good proofreader looks into the translation for errors in it. His most important ability lies in amending and correcting the minor mistakes or errors hidden in the translated sentences comparing with the original text. He plays a role to adjust the improper expressions and synonyms as well as correct the mistaken spellings to make the translation more professional. Self-check is often used for small translation projects. It requires translators’ high writing quality and self-examination ability. For some projects with more than 1000 words the self-check is beyond the scope the translator can undo the mistakes in the translation because the more translated words there are, the easier the mistakes occur.

It is a must to have the translation double checked by another one in this situation. A professional translation cannot contain any minor mistake in it. The translation for publication with mistakes can destroy the public image of an organization or a company. Any translation company pursuing zero rate of error can be considered as to be responsible to its clients. For anything the result is the most important. Whatever quality control process a translation company apply, it must guarantee an accurate, sterling, fluent translation without any minor error delivered to its clients.

Case Study global translation company, high quality translation service, legal document translation, technical document translation, thesis translation, translation resources