Financial and legal translation

One of the most in-demand professional translation specialties in business is financial and legal translation. Both disciplines have a very rich and specific terminology, which results in highly complex translation projects.

Financial translation and its challenges

Financial translation covers a wide range of company documentation, ranging from audit reports to annual accounts, stock exchange documentation, shareholder meeting minutes and financial statements.

Normally, the greater a company's international outreach, the more documentation is likely to need translating. These translated documents are usually for the management of a parent company or subsidiary, shareholders, business partners or authorities.

Other particular issues inherent in financial translation include:

• A lot of foreign terms are used, thus requiring the financial translator to decide whether to try to translate them into the target language or leave them as they are.
• Each legal framework requires different formats for financial documents. Translators and agencies handling these translation projects need therefore to be familiar with the formats specific to each country.
• Financial language is rich in polysemy - that is, terms with multiple meanings; terminology can be tremendously ambiguous and each word or term may have no meaning outside its usual context.

Legal translation: what is it and why is it so important?

Legal translation entails translating legal documents, usually written by legal professionals and containing a large number of terms that are highly specific and limited to this specialist field.

In legal translation, there are clear differences depending on the scope of the document.Thus, there are official documents (issued by public bodies or authorities) and private documents (written to regulate a legal business between companies or private individuals).

Further, depending on the branch of law, there are different types of typical legal translation documents:

• Commercial law: agreements for creating, merging, acquiring or dissolving companies, contracts for sale, and lease agreements.
• Civil law: marriage certificates, divorce settlements, prenuptial agreements, trusts, wills, powers of attorney.
• Criminal law: certificates relating to criminal records, convictions, appeals, lawsuits.

A professional translator handling legal translation projects takes on a significant responsibility, as any mistake they makes can have legal repercussions for the parties involved.

In conclusion, both types of translation project (financial and legal) share the same type of profile in regard to the ideal translator - namely, an international translator who is capable of comparing legal frameworks in order to meet the requirements of each country's legal system. In short, you need a translator who works with an agency like sanscrit.