It’s a fact of life that mistakes happen. Sometimes they are caused by human error, sometimes by operator error (that’s still human error, right?) and sometimes they just happen for inexplicable reasons.
However, mistakes made as a result of not understanding subject matter are, at best, embarrassing, and, at worst, cause great financial loss to clients.
Last week, we were called upon to fix up a translation project which had been conducted by a non-specialist agency. I have no desire to point fingers or blame but wish to reiterate a point that we make consistently: translations should be undertaken by subject experts only. I wouldn’t ask my dentist to take a look at my suspension nor my mechanic to fit braces.
In the end, we had to bill the client for our time in almost re-writing the original work. This means that they would have paid at least twice for what should essentially have been the same work.
It’s not just the understanding of the topic which is important, it is the understanding of the industry. The majority of our legal translators are former lawyers. As such, they understand:
- confidentiality of translated documents;
- the importance of deadlines;
- that everything needs to be double checked (twice!); and
- attention to detail is everything in a legal translation.
We don’t make this point for the sake of marketing spin. It is a well-established rule that legal translations should only be undertaken by those who really “get it”. Of course, we are all human and we have made errors in our work in the past and we have missed some deadlines (only a couple, mind you!) but in order to maximise the likelihood of a piece of legal translation work being completed correctly the first time, we would suggest that you only use legal translation specialists. Otherwise, that contract or judgment may end up costing twice as much to translate.
If you have any tricky legal translation work that you’d like us to look at, feel free to contact us.
Linguistico