"And sometimes it's the 'false friends' that lead you onto the slippery slope and that you can stumble over," says a colleague from Westphalia. That applies to expressions which are known at first sight, but which then have several meanings, the differences between which must be known in order to choose the correct equivalent. "Guarantee" in English, for example, can mean guarantee but also surety. The two expressions are different in substance and cannot be used arbitrarily.
A translator reports that the personal style of a lawyer is really demanding in translation and cannot be solved with a good technical dictionary alone. Especially the correspondence is always characterized by an ironic or even cynical undertone. "And either one listens to it and tries to find a correspondence on the same level, or the text loses character because it either becomes factual and sober or is falsified because the translation overshoots the mark. It's a tightrope walk!" Sometimes she is really proud when a translation is a success, and in rare cases the clients also react with praise.
Like all technical translators, legal translators also complain about the high time pressure. "When a law firm calls me and wants a 20-page expert opinion translated by tomorrow, I now feel free to wish them good luck in their search," reports a sobered colleague. She does not want to take the risk of making mistakes under too much time pressure. In fact, errors in legal translations can have serious consequences and, in the worst case, lead to legal action.
However, time flexibility is an important criterion for many clients when they commission a translation. Most of the time, things have to happen quickly so as not to unnecessarily delay communication and a procedure. It can be an advantage not to have to rely on a single translator who may be working on another assignment. If the decision is made to work with a translation agency in such a case, a project coordinator clarifies the content, time and formal requirements with the customer in advance. S/he then selects the appropriate expert for the customer's field and language combination from his pool of translators with different specialisations. S/he clarifies the availability of the colleague and is available for text preparation and queries to the customer. In addition, an agency usually offers another decisive advantage: the revision of the text by a second, equally qualified translator. The text is thus edited by two technically competent translators and often improves both stylistically and factually. "Unfortunately, there are black sheep among the agencies as well. Mainly due to time constraints and sometimes attempts are made to squeeze the price and let translators compete against each other. Fair treatment of freelancers is also a quality criterion for me. You can usually tell that from how long an agency works with its translators," says a colleague from the field.
Working with an agency also offers a wider range of different specialisations that individual specialist translators bring to the table, as well as a greater variety of languages. For clients who are active in different countries, it is therefore also a good idea to hire an agency. Characteristic for legal translations is also the demand for quality and the realization that high quality cannot be guaranteed by cheaper machine translations, but is highly professional manual work.
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