So you can write and speak legalese. Can you also translate it?

Interesting insights into how law firms manage their translations have reached the ears of some of our colleagues at Lingo24 recently. It seems that quite a few law firm managers often encourage trainees to translate legal documents.

Though it might seem handy to have someone available to undertake translations at low cost and virtually around the clock, our long-term experience in the translation industry shows that the results are not always as hoped for.

Having good or even perfect language skills in, say, French or Italian, is never enough when it comes to tackling specialised translations. Particularly in the legal sector, translating the jargon – or legalese, as it is often called – from one language to another, without being specialised, can often lead to terribly distorted meanings.

Therefore, we believe that failing to use specialised legal translation services ( http://www.lingo24.com/legal_translation.htm ) may sound like a cheap and fast solution, but in fact the decision is neither cost nor time-effective. It may also damage relations between law firms and their employees or result in lower quality translation than is required, thus damaging the firm’s activity.

Since we base the opinions above on experience rather than official numbers, we’d like to ask people working in law firms to help us understand the issue better. That is why we have started this short online survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=U3Sa_2fZAS9e9A4LA9K_2fVV4A_3d_3d

It won’t take more than 5 minutes to answer the questions, and if we manage to get 1,000 respondents, we'll make a donation to the charity most respondents vote for. In addition, we'll give the first 30 people to respond a stylish, limited edition Lingo24 T-shirt, and the top three respondents will get a magnum of champagne! Most importantly of all, as soon as we have the final results, we'll make them public, thus helping law firms make the right decision about how they manage their translation requirements.