Comments on: Do you really want your lawyer searching for ‘free legal English translation’? http://www.matthewbennett.es/1065/do-you-really-want-your-lawyer-searching-for-free-legal-english-translation/ English and Spanish law, language, business and culture. Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:52:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: MatthewBennett http://www.matthewbennett.es/1065/do-you-really-want-your-lawyer-searching-for-free-legal-english-translation/#comment-583 MatthewBennett Mon, 04 May 2009 15:25:08 +0000 http://www.matthewbennett.es/?p=1065#comment-583 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.<br><br>Worse for you would be your lawyer knowing what he doesn't know and deciding to do nothing.<br><br>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.<br><br>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?<br><br>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). 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).

]]> By: midnightgolfer http://www.matthewbennett.es/1065/do-you-really-want-your-lawyer-searching-for-free-legal-english-translation/#comment-581 midnightgolfer Mon, 04 May 2009 01:42:12 +0000 http://www.matthewbennett.es/?p=1065#comment-581 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. 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.

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