Document Translation Process and Services

Document Translation Process and Services

Document translators are like old-school barbers, one wrong move – and you can create lots of problems for your client. Wrong translation in documents may lead to the person starting the whole bureaucratic process from the beginning, or even having lawsuits and losing money. At the same time, a translator has to make the language of the translated document look and sound natural, especially if the two languages differ much. That is often the biggest dilemma of linguists who work with documents.

Translation of personal documents

Birth certificates, driver's licenses or marriage certificates are the most frequently translated personal documents. They may be required for citizenship or residence permit applications, work applications, requests for new documents after the surname change, and even, in some cases, for visa applications. In these cases, people need professional translators to help them.

The main rule of working with such documents is translating every piece of text you see, including even the small print and stamps. Another important issue is to correctly put in all the personal data: people's names, company names, place-names, as well as names of legal bodies and governmental organizations which issued the documents. Sometimes it may be hard to transfer the names from the non-Latin languages to English. For this, translators may ask the clients to additionally give their names as written in their foreign passports.

Traps of legal documents

Other legal documents, like contracts (including real estate contracts of buying and renting) non-disclosure agreements, medical documents and even commercial invoices are much more difficult to translate. This is because such documents feature extended amounts of text which is not that much institutionalized as in birth or marriage certificates.

The main requirement to a legal document is preciseness. A person doing the translation should put the target language text in the way to eschew ambiguities in meaning. To do this, he or she has to choose most words with only one meaning, or at least use them only in their direct meaning. While in literary translation omission and addition (sense development) methods are used, in document translation one cannot add or remove anything from the document in order to preserve the meaning.

In addition, a document translation specialist has to be proficient in legal terms and abbreviations, which can be international (including those of Latin origin) or local. Concerning the internationalisms, he or she should always be aware of the so-called 'false friends of a translator' which are words that look or sound similarly in different languages, but have significant differences in their meaning.

Cultural differences: explain the unexplainable

Frequently document translators are asked to do the verbatim translation of a document. In the view of laymen, this is the most precise way to translate a text, as nothing is added or omitted, even accidentally. However, they can hardly understand that the resulting documents will sound and look very odd in the target language. That's why a skilled professional will always stick to special interpreting standards to ensure the faithful and fluent translation.

The thing is that various countries may have differences in many aspects. For example, differences between two languages can be grammatic (e.g., usage of active or passive tense), stylistic (usage of phrasal verbs, idioms or colloquialisms in the document) or structural (the way the sentences are built).

There can also be differences between legal systems, which means a translator has to know how to create and structure the document as well as how to present its contents in the target language. Finally, he or she has to keep in mind all the cultural subtleties and differences existing in both languages, even concerning the usage of common words.