En EspañolDo you really want your lawyer searching for ‘free legal English translation’?
Checking my blog stats this morning I saw the following phrase that had led a searcher to my blog:
Do you really want your lawyer searching for this phrase?
“spanish legal page that translates texts in English for free”
He ended up on the English Spanish Legal Translator category page but I thought: hang on, is this person really searching for free legal translation?
Does he (or she) really know what he’s asking for?
Maybe it was a lawyer looking for a cheap way to translate a contract or maybe a businessman doing the same thing.
Machine translation tools (even some of the free ones) are reasonably good at translating individual words (depending on the context) or small, simple phrases.
They can also give you the gist of what a longer general article is about as long as you’re happy only understanding say 70% of the article and you don’t mind what the other 30% might say.
But whilst machine translation efforts have advanced a lot over the last few years, it is definitely not a good idea to entrust your legal translations to a machine.
Maybe one day a better translation machine will be invented but for the moment, if you find out your lawyer is searching for these phrases to translate your contracts and legal documents, please gently ask him to hire a professional translator.
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I would think that if I had a lawyer, I assume I would be able to hire one that was an expert on the laws here in Spain, for which I needed consulting in the first place. So if I can pay this lawyer to be my best advocate over here, it would not matter to me that their English skills were not perfect, and if they used a free “translation” as a FIRST STEP to reviewing English language documents, i would be fine with that, but only to save time, and money, in the process of getting my business done for me, and to determine if a third party, professional translator were necessary.
Absolutely, you would definitely hope that if you were hiring an expert then he or she would take things very seriously with your legal affairs and realise that if he doesn't understand something crucial, he needs to contact a professional translator – he knows (or realises) what he doesn't know and decides to do something about it.
Worse for you would be your lawyer knowing what he doesn't know and deciding to do nothing.
I think perhaps what I was trying to get at was more the concept of unknown unknowns as applied to translation – depending on your lawyer's linguistic ability and his confidence in his own ability, he might not even know that he doesn't know what he's looking at – legal terminology and concepts can be very tricky sometimes. Such a situation would be very bad news for your foreign language legal or medical affairs.
Understanding the gist of an article is an important skill and an important step, as you rightly point out, but if I don't understand 20% of the words in the article, how can I possibly know if they're relevant or important enough to require human translation?
Things only get worse in this respect the more we mix the meaning of individual words with the meaning of phrases and paragraphs, and the further up the linguistic difficulty scale we move (e.g. bar side chat > news article > opinion article > academic article/contract/medical reports).