Pingback: Legalizing your | From Spain How to translate the beginning of a Spanish contract into English What can you do with a multilingual contract as part of a legal dispute in the United States? All foreign language documents filed in proceedings before the Federal Court must be translated into English. Federal Rule of Evidence 604 provides that “the interpreter shall be subject to the provisions of these Rules relating to the qualification of expert witness”. The rule has been extended to translators, and they can therefore be qualified as experts under the federal rule of evidence 702. In many cases, parties offer different translators with opinions that claim that the reliability of someone else`s translation is imperfect. Pingback: Legal your | From Spain Tip for translating contracts (5): Create a library of clauses Contracts are legally binding documents that describe the terms of an agreement between two parties. As the name suggests, the translation of legal contracts (also known as the translation of legal agreements) involves transferring a contract from one language to another. The translation of legal contracts is a specific service in the broader discipline of translation of legal documents. Poor translations lead to the loss of precise language. In many cases, an individual lawyer or small law firm tries to save costs for the client by using a non-lawyer to translate contracts. There are stories of people using secretaries to translate contracts (“She speaks Spanish, no matter the dialect”) or using computer programs.
Even receiving general translations from translation services can cause problems if they do not explain the range of potential translations that could result from a particular legal sentence. A translator may need to choose between three, five, ten or zero words in a foreign language for a particular legal concept that the lawyer originally described in a legal contract. A translator who is not a lawyer may not fully understand the goods or services described, the customs and industry practices that are used, or the importance of the accuracy of that description. If this is not taken into account in the translation and the legal implications of the choice of words are not understood, the effect of the contractual language carefully formulated by the lawyer may be completely lost when translating into a second language. Think about the time it usually takes to draft and negotiate a commercial contract in English for your client – and the extent to which the parties can discuss the inclusion or exclusion of a single word or sentence. In the event that two languages are used and signed by a client, negotiations and issues should extend to both contract formats. If the parties sign a contract and it is considered part of their agreement, they must be aware of its implications; their ignorance of the foreign language will not be an excuse. For contracts, you can define the language of the formula as follows: The answer “Why, English of course!” may be tempting, but this is not always true. Complex policy considerations that influence the choice of the contractual language of a prudent lawyer in a cross-border contract include the examination of probable claims that may arise, the likely place of jurisdiction for dispute resolution, and the recoverability and enforceability of all judgments obtained. One of the most common challenges in translating legal contracts is the way different legal systems use different languages, so there is no local equivalent for certain terms and concepts. The reason is simple: if you plan to plead before a Chinese (or foreign) court, the staff of that court will not speak English.
You will not read English. Even if they read English, the Rules of Procedure of the Court will require that the documents be translated into the national language. If you have already determined that the party with whom you are entering into a contract has no assets outside their own country and that redress in local courts is faster than arbitration, why would you ever want to have a contract in English that spoils these foreign proceedings? The only language that the foreign court will deal with is his own, and contracts that are in several languages will confuse the problem. .