There is no setting in life that an exception of unprepared occurrences and is not subjected to the law. That is why the law is composed of criminal law, property law, tax law, contract law, corporation’s law, international law and constitutions are amended regularly to provide for every situation of life. I would therefore not be conclusive to say insurance and legal services should be secured at once. Even in monolingual cases, putting into consideration that it’s not a mere word but technical terminology that aids legal communication; one should not secure legalistic insurance and leave translation services, for the law has a system bound linguistic in nature.
How to obtain quality translation
Asr you have heard from every language translation agency that it delivers quality on time with cost effectiveness, but the client too has to contribute to obtaining such a service;
Provide enough information about the subject of translation. Share contacts in case of reference. Deliver neat and unambiguous hard/soft copy documents so that translatable text is visible and can be precisely translated.
Be time conscious. Deliver your translation project in time and give the translation agency enough time otherwise translation quality may be comprised for a rush to suffice a short deadline.
Enough research about the translation agency and their translators ought to be done. Of course, I guess we are aware that quality and accurate translation services can only be delivered by humans. However, scrutiny and research need to be done before going forward with any translation company.
What is difference between professional translators and freelancer translators?
Translation prices
Mind the cost. Low prices not only for legal translations, but other translation fields too are questionable and tend to compromise quality. I may not explain what poor quality legal translation result but I believe the consequences are regular. This is not limited to legal translation but rather the entire translation fields. On the reverse, translation project may be more costly demanding than you rethink and look for a moderate charge. All I am saying here is that your translation project should neither be too costly nor too cheap. An extreme of anything has a problem. You and a translation company have to strike a deal here in that you need to offer a price that would oblige the agency and the agency too has charge what makes its client breathe.
Characteristics of quality legal translation services
Separate from familiarity with legal formality, terminology and wide vocabulary by the legal translators, good translation services should be personalized; not by machines, flexible; this would mean they have broad legal knowledge and experience, and professional that is not only by language speakers but native certified legal translators. Providers of legal translation services should know what is required of a legal translation, why they are translating, how to translate, when to deliver to mean timely delivery, who is the target audience, in terms of culture and source of target language so as to use the minimal legalese, where to operate; they should be within the country where services are needed. The latter may be reflected by a translation agency’s website, but a deep person to person discussion need to be done to establish whether what is talked on the website is matching the actual work.
Quality management
Not forgetting that different aspects of quality may apply differently, let us go through a few guidelines.
- Total quality management. Considering customers first, make continuous improvement, aiming at zero defect, training, and development. This means delivering personalized services meeting the customer’s requirements.
- Translation process management. This includes sharing information among translators, maintaining glossaries and translation memory for different projects and stage by stage monitoring of translation process by the indoor project managers.
- Translation product quality assurance. This requires solicitation of feedback and evaluation of translator’s performance for career appraisal purposes.