Challenges and Implications in High-quality Legal Translation- 大数跨境

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Challenges and Implications in High-quality Legal Translation

Trustiics 诚汇达

2020-05-10

导读：专家见解：高质量法律翻译的挑战与启示

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Translation is hard work. A good translation is the product of an experienced translator who has excellent command of both the source and target languages and who has exerted tremendous effort in studying, analyzing and writing during the translation process. Translators face countless challenges in their attempt to tackle issues like linguistic and cultural differences between a language pair, particularly in translating legal documents. This is due to the technical language and jargon involved in legal communications and the “system gap” between one national legal system and another, which is even more evident with respect to translating Chinese/English legal texts. Understanding legalese across the languages, finding or creating a Chinese equivalent of an English legal term and achieving readability while maintaining accuracy, to name a few, are all common obstacles that legal translators have to overcome in translating between the two languages.

Navigating these difficulties requires more than just languages kills. Legal translators must keep studying legalese and business vocabulary in both languages whenever they encounter new terminology, so as to be specialized in translating certain types of legal documents, such as agreements and contracts, laws and regulations, case headnotes, regulatory and complianced ocuments, legal memos, due diligence questionnaires, investment term sheets, patents, subpoenas and depositions. Furthermore, translators need to be familiar with industry-specific legal language used in areas such as banking and finance, securities, corporate, litigation, media and entertainment and life sciences.

Art or Science

There are arguments as to whether legal translation is science or art, or more of a science than an art. I personally believe that translation can be 50% science and 50% art, regardless of the nature and form of the written contents to be translated. The contents could be in the form of Word documents, Excel worksheets, PowerPoint slides, email or text messages, audio or video clips or movie subtitles and so forth. Sometimes a legal document can include conversations, descriptions, storytelling or similar contents of a literary nature. Court rulings, case headnotes, testimonies/depositions, patent descriptions, etc. are all likely to contain descriptive material. Similarly, it is possible for a literary work to contain legal content. Whatever the nature and form of the source text, the process of translation always involves immense efforts in scientific research and analysis, as well as a creative mind.

The Chinese and English languages are more unlike each other than any other language pairs, given that the cultural systems of China and the English-speaking countries are only remotely related. In addition to tackling the complex compound sentence structures and legal terminology in legal-speak, translators have to deal with unique difficulties with respect to translating English/Chinese legal documents. Because much legal terminology found in common law is not reflected in Chinese legal language, diligent translators have to spend a long time finding or creating the equivalent of a legal term in the source document. This involves efforts in understanding the terminology, searching online and offline references (including glossaries of terms and industry knowledge in both the source and target languages), analyzing all the collected information and identifying the most suitable equivalent or, if needed, creating one on the basis of all the said efforts as well as the translator’s language capability, work experience and business/legal sense. Creativity is also involved in translators’ attempts to achieve the best possible choice of words, well-structured sentences and high readability, or in some cases, even elegance or artistic refinement, while maintaining accuracy. This presents additional challenges when translating alegal document between Chinese and English.

Precision and Consistency

Precision is no doubt an essential goal in translating any type of text. When dealing with a legal document, a translator should focus not only on accurately reflecting the nuances of the source document, including those of legal terms, but also on using the defined terms consistently throughout. Consistency is certainly subject to precision.

To achieve accuracy, a translator will first need to understand the source text, and, in the case of legal translation, the legal terminology in particular. The Chinese language, in contrast to English, is characterized by ambiguity and less-structured sentences. Writing a Chinese sentence that conveys the writer’s message clearly and concisely can be challenging even to native Chinese speakers. In translating Chinese legal documents, translators can face profound difficulties in comprehending the Chinese source text, given the ambiguous nature of the language itself and the legal tradition of the nation. Likewise, when translating an English legal document into Chinese, it is very challenging for a translator to find the Chinese equivalent of each of the English legal terms in the source document and present a readable translation.

Context Is the Key

When conveying meaning between Chinese and English, translators are likely to be hindered by the Chinese way of thinking, given the complexity and uniqueness of Chinese grammar. In addition to the issue of multiple meanings of a given word, Chinese grammar lacks singular or plural forms, articles, and verb conjugation to indicate tenses, and constantly omits the subject of a sentence. It is therefore particularly vital for translators to always take context into consideration; a translation that is not based on context could deviate from the meaning originally intended in the source text.

Importance of High-Quality Legal Translation

Mistranslation could, in some cases, entail a future (if not present) dispute or other costly problems. Sometimes an inaccurate translation of small words, either consistently or otherwise, can lead to significant impact in the legal context. Take the Motion Fitness vs. Changzhou Yingcai Metalwork Fitness Equipment case, a 2014 patent infringement dispute, as an example: according to an article posted on Morningside Translations’ website on January 30, 2018, “the indefinite article ‘a’ was translated on each instance in the Chinese version of the patent claims to ‘one’ — a specific numerical value. This narrowed the scope of protection in the claims and wound up fatally undermining the plaintiff’s case.”

In many cases, an inaccurate translation is likely to result in at least a delay in contract negotiations or other business communications and a waste of time for all the parties concerned. Although lawyers or other professionals involved in the negotiations or other communications, if any of them are bilingual, could help to identify and correct errors randomly found in a translation or even proof read the entire translated text, this could be frustrating when they have already worked long hours on drafting and negotiating legal documents or communicating with business partners.

Sometimes another translator or agency has to be hired to redo a poor translation, which is a loss of both time and money. Many China-based translation service agencies outsource projects to freelancers who are students or teachers from universities in China, which is the only way for them to cut costs. Those students and teachers generally lack legal translation and work experience with businesses. Using a service like this may seems cost-efficient but will inevitably pose risks. However, high rates may not necessarily mean high quality; I have seen some quite poor translation products provided by high-priced translation services. Last but not least, a bad translation could be detrimental to the reputation of the company that has used it in communicating with its potential business partners.

It therefore helps to have well-trained and highly experienced legal translators, who are especially at tuned to subtle ties and details in documents, handle your translation projects for your cross-cultural business and legal communications. High-quality translation services also demonstrate professionalism, and therefore, are beneficial to the reputation of their users. Trustiics offers an effective platform for you to easily identify the right resources. It has already screened translators for you, which saves you the trouble of searching myriad sources for legal translation services that are both high-quality and cost-efficient.

The Author

Debbie Ding

Senior Translator (Part-time) of Warburg Pincus in Beijing

Debbie is a professional legal translator with over 26 years of translation experience and specializes in both Chinese to English and English to Chinese translations. She has extensive experience in translating various types of legal and business documents that cover a wide variety of industrial sectors. Debbie has an excellent command of both English and Chinese in all aspects and has natural attention to detail as a result of more than 20 years of training and work at a number of MNCs and international law firms in Beijing. She also has experience in market study and other aspects of business activities.

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