Why Certified Translation is Crucial for Legal and Official Documents

Various special precautions can help keep you safe when working with legal and official documents. The language used in these documents is very peculiar and structured around some unique requirements. Other things to consider, such as privacy and confidential information. Ensuring that you’re working with a certified translation expert is crucial.

You must be sure you’re leaving this to professionals who know what they’re doing. At The Language Doctors, we have extensive experience providing certified translations and working with clients of all types. In this article, we have gathered all our experience into a couple of pages. So, we’d like to explain the importance of certified translation in detail.

How Are Legal and Official Document Translations Different from Regular Translation Jobs?

Translating legal and official documents is quite different from translating regular paperwork. There is usually some strict formatting to be adhered to, and the language used is unique compared to traditional English. These translation jobs typically have additional requirements like more rigid deadlines and particular privacy concerns.

And, of course, you should never underestimate the potential impact on the client’s operations. You must always work with a certified translation agency whenever you need to translate official documents.

The Language Doctors understands those issues and their potential impact on your organization. Our company has been delving quite deeply into this field lately. We’ve been attempting to identify common problems related to translation accuracy and suitable solutions to them. Our experts have summarized most of our findings in a recently published whitepaper — and we encourage you to give it a read if these issues are relevant to you: https://thelanguagedoctors.org/white-paper/

Legal Language Flows Differently Than Regular English

Compared to traditional English, legal writing looks pretty different. Even people who are familiar with English usually struggle when reading legal documents. And when writing papers in the appropriate style, things get even more complicated. That’s one good reason to want to work with a certified translation service provider. The translation specialists employed by the agency will know precisely how to structure their sentences and translate everything without straying too far away from the expected style, ensuring to maintain of the documents’ authenticity at every step.

Strict Formatting Requirements

Not only that, but legal documents also come with some strict formatting requirements compared to regular paperwork. It’s essential to ensure that the text is formatted correctly. Especially if the client submits the document to government institutions and similar organizations, even if those papers are only needed for a business partner or a client, they will probably still expect that these requirements are observed.

This is something else that a qualified translation agency like The Language Doctors can help you with. You can leverage our experience to ensure all your documents are correctly translated and appropriately formatted. We’ve worked with legal documents of various types and for many different purposes. All of our translators are familiar with the strict formatting requirements of the field.

Frequent Revisions

Revisions are often required when working with legal documents. One single document can often go through multiple versions over its lifetime. Sometimes those revisions will have very tight deadlines. In any case, it’s a good idea to work with a certified translation agency and stick to that agency in the long term because that way, they can just build on their previous work.

Otherwise, you will have a lot of extra overhead in introducing new translators to the project and ensuring that you’re on the same page as them. When you’re working with the same agency for all of your translation work, they will often also be able to suggest improvements to your existing documentation.

Building on our past work with you is not a special expectation for The Language Doctors — it’s the norm when you’re working with us.

Literal Translations Are Always Preferred Over Creative Ones

Another good reason to insist on certified translation work for your legal and official documents is that a good translation company will know how to translate everything as directly as possible without taking any creative detours. Translation work often involves a good deal of creativity. However, when it comes to legal documents, there is no room for that. Accuracy is an important factor in this type of work. You have to make sure that translations are as literal as possible. You can’t let the translator add their own interpretation or modify the original intended meaning in any other way.

Private and Confidential Information

Legal documents often contain lots of private and confidential information. You must ensure you’re submitting them to a party that respects those circumstances. You might often have to get the translation agency to sign an NDA. That’s the only way to ensure that they will be legally compliant. For a certified translation agency, this is just part of the job and something they have likely done many times. On the other hand, someone less experienced might have certain qualms about the situation, and you could have difficulties working with them.

The risks and consequences of this type of work are not to be underestimated. You must work with someone who respects the translation process and has experience with it from every angle.

Working with Multiple Parties for Your Certified Translation

Something else that frequently comes up when working with legal documents is that they involve multiple parties from different organizations. To this end, the translation agency’s work also involves a certain degree of coordination. They occasionally probe different parties for information and relay that to others. And throughout that, they have to ensure that they respect the privacy requirements of their job.

That’s another good reason to work with a certified translation agency. Not only will they have no problems working with multiple parties, but they may be able to guide you through the process and give you useful tips for facilitating that communication.

Our work at The Language Doctors has involved multiple scenarios where we had to coordinate the communication of multiple parties. We’ve developed various internal procedures and tools to handle this, and hardly anything can surprise us on that front at this point.

How We Can Help

Working with non-certified translation services might be okay for a while. But sooner or later, it will present a problem and will usually be very challenging to resolve. We understand that better than most. At The Language Doctors, we have worked with clients in various industries for many years. We understand the requirements of legal translations perfectly well.

We can provide you with a comprehensive service that covers your needs from A to Z. This includes cases where you need something done on short notice. Feel free to contact The Language Doctors with more complicated projects too. The long-running experience of our experts has exposed them to many different scenarios you might encounter in your projects. Visit the website now: https://thelanguagedoctors.org/

Closing Thoughts

Don’t waste any time working with a random translation agency when you need work done on official or legal documents. The sooner you start working with a certified translation agency, the smoother the overall experience will be for you. And in the long term, you will also benefit from an established partnership with a reliable contractor who can take on your future orders. The first step is in your hands. Contact The Language Doctors and learn what we can do for your project! Request a quote here: https://thelanguagedoctors.org/