Legal, juridical and financial translations

Legal, juridical and financial translations

Bantelmann Translate offers legal, juridical and financial translations for the civil, criminal and administrative sectors using native speakers who are specialised in law and are also able to provide sworn translations.

What are legal and juridical translation?

Legal and juridical translations are a particular type of document translation, i.e. they deal with the conversion, from one language to another, of contents of particular and specific juridical/legal value.
What marks out this specific task is the very high degree of specialisation: firstly, legal terms are always extremely precise in their meaning, secondly, this meaning may vary from language to language – or, to make things even more complicated, a particular legal term may express an institution that does not even exist in one culture and therefore in the relevant language, a situation which then requires a comparative legal analysis and the construction of complex periphrases in order to ensure the transfer of meaning.
For all these reasons, juridical and legal translations can never be carried out in a completely automated manner, nor do they allow for approximations or errors, which in a contract, just to name an example, could have catastrophic consequences.

What is financial translation?

Specifically, financial translation includes all documentation relating to balance sheets, financial analyses, and all those periodic documents that are required for the transmission of information in the sector concerned.
A distinctive feature of all legal translations, including financial documents, is the need for results of extraordinary quality, which must convey highly specialised content using sector-specific language. The use of correct terminology is therefore vital, as is brevity: many financial documents must allow a clear picture of the financial reality described at a glance.
Financial translations therefore make extensive use of computer-assisted translation tools, which guarantee the use of the official standard terminologies indicated by banks and official financial bodies, while also exploiting the highly repetitive nature that marks out part of the contents in this sector to achieve consistent results over time.

Who requires legal and financial translations?

Legal translations are required in all areas of law: civil, criminal and administrative. Especially as a result of increasing globalisation, all kinds of legal or financial documents may need to be concluded between counterparts from different cultures and languages, who may also be operating within different legal systems, as mentioned above.

Legal translations may therefore be requested by a wide range of different clients: on the one hand, law firms, notary offices, tax law firms and tax specialists, but also auditing and consulting firms, companies, and public authorities, as well as banks and credit institutions. Financial translations are required by clients such as multinational enterprises and listed companies.

In all these cases, the need for absolute accuracy remains constant and requires consummate linguistic and legal skills in both the original and the target language: an oversight or a poorly explained concept could radically change the meaning or value of a contract between companies, expose visitors to unintentional violations of the law, or even compromise an agreement between nations – or expose companies to the risk of huge financial losses. This naturally goes along with the need for absolute confidentiality.

Which kinds of documents require legal and financial translations?

Legal translations are required, as mentioned, by many different clients, and can therefore include extremely diverse documents, from simple contracts to important personal documents. The same applies to the field of financial translation, although the variety of documents is not quite as wide.

This is but a brief overview of the main types of documentation for which a legal or financial translation is required:

Our method and approach

As mentioned above, any ambiguity (or worse, mistake) must be carefully avoided in a financial or legal translation job, in order to avoid consequences that could prove severe.

Thus, the use of legal translators is required in the field of legal translations: professionals who combine excellent knowledge of the required languages with a thorough knowledge of the law of both cultures involved in the translation process. In much the same way, financial translation professionals need to have an in-depth knowledge of the concepts and realities of the sector, so that prior to the translation process they are able to fully comprehend the meaning of a balance sheet item or of the complex conclusions of a business analysis.

A purely literal translation is almost never possible, and in practice, as mentioned above, entirely new periphrases must often be created to convey a concept that lacks its own individual expression and terminology in the target language, meaning that details assume even greater importance than in other fields; additionally, legal and juridical translations constitute a field in which confidentiality and discretion – even secrecy – of translated documents are of paramount importance.

It is in this area that sworn or certified translations are often required. A sworn translation is a translation whose content has been declared as accurate under oath before a registrar.

Available languages

Bantelmann Translate is able to offer specialist translations on legal and judicial subjects from and into a wide range of languages: