legal advice

When faced with sending the odd email or letter abroad in a foreign language, we can generally handle the translation well enough (or one of our colleagues can).
When faced, however, with any form of legal correspondence, without doubt, a top notch professional translation will be required or you run the risk of your credibility sinking faster than the Titanic.
The difficulty in translating a legal document is that it is couched in its own terminology that is very often undecipherable even in English. An even greater hurdle to translation lies in the history and development of our law, which is developed from a system of judicial precedent rather than from an origin in Roman law, common throughout most of Europe.
Judicial precedent is where judges make a certain decision in a case and should a similar case be brought forward, and the facts of the case are materially the same, then the ruling of the previous decision will be followed.
Some of these judge-made legal precedents are binding, others are merely persuasive…ratio decidendi and obiter dicta.
Ratio decidendi means literally: the reason for coming to the decision. It forms the statement of law upon which the judge based his final decision…this part of the judgement could form a binding precedent.
Obiter dictum means: other things which were said. They are other statements of law that were mentioned, but did not actually form part of the final decision. Obiter dicta are not binding, but may provide assistance to future judges if they are relevant…they are a persuasive authority.
Our system of Common Law and Equity developed from these judge-made precedents. Over time, these accumulated judgements were codified into Acts of Parliament and the role of judges was to interpret these acts if they were not clear or did not specifically cover the material facts of the case in hand.
You will already have been more than aware that the law is very complex and perhaps with this brief explanation of the underlying principles, you can see that our law is based not only on codified acts, but that one must be aware of the spirit of the law to fathom or convey its true nature.
Clearly then, when faced with having to convert an English legal document for use abroad, or when having to decipher a foreign legal missive, what is needed is a professional translation that will not only convey the meaning but also the true spirit of your document.
This kind of expertise is not at all common, requiring not only superb linguistic ability but also a keen knowledge of the principles of English and International law. To trust your legal transcripts then, to any translation company just on the basis that they can perform a linguistic conversion, is tantamount to letting a child read a Dostoyevsky novel and expecting a lucid summary of the underlying message.
There is an old saying, used when the law leads to a ridiculous decision; “The law is an ass” If you don’t get yourself the right professional translation company there’s every chance that you could be left looking like one too!