With more and more businesses being involved in the global market than ever before, it’s important that legal translations of key business documents are taken seriously by these emerging global businesses and that there are no legal translation mistakes. It does not matter which area of industry a business is involved in taking on foreign markets involves a lot of red tape. The first thing to deal with is ensuring translations are done of any legal documents that are needed to fulfil the red tape. If the legal translations are poor quality then all sorts of problems could occur which could lead to lawsuits if a product fails to do what it’s supposed to do or the instructions are poorly translated so they are difficult to understand.

5 potential legal translation errors:

1.Just using a machine translator

Legal documents can’t be translated well by a machine translator as it’s not loaded with data that has the capacity to understand the intricacies of a legal document.

2.Failing to get suitable legal and linguistic expertise

It’s essential to use a translator who has experience and legal expertise in translation projects that you need translated. For example, if you want legal documents translated that are related to corporate law you need to choose a legal translator who has this sort of experience and expert knowledge.

3.Only using the literal translation

An inexperienced translator commonly uses literal translations of a text which is not usually acceptable. On occasions a sentence has a direct translation into a second language but its meaning may be quite different. This should be avoided at all costs.

4.Thinking about translation as a last resort

In order to get the best work out of your chosen translators you should plan and discuss your translation projects with the translator first. This ensures that some of your key business or brand terminology is consistently used in the translated documents and that there are no translation errors.

5. Failing to plan your translation projects

One of the marketing translation mistakes that is a bad practice is failing to have a lot of your business’s documents translated so that your next translation batch follows the same pattern so your business or brand is recognised. A translator will accumulate a dictionary of words called glossaries related to your business so by planning your translation projects in advance means you can use the same translator who has this information stored to be used just for your business.