If one founder has worked in the legal business for 10 years, and the other has always had their heart in the law faculty, their business child cannot but be affected by this. For Task Force, attention to detail (quotation marks, dashes, commas, and terms in general), “paranoia” about the quality of work, NDA agreements, service level agreements, and other minor legal details have long ago become commonplace norms.
Perhaps that is why the Task Force team has been providing services to half of Ukraine’s top 50 law firms and several foreign legal professionals since 2011. The company has earned the respect and loyalty of legal departments from the real sector. We value 8 years of partnership with the “Jurydycha Practyka (Legal Practice)” publishing house that keeps us aware of the most relevant changes in the legal industry and helps us grow together with our customers.
Our team is our highest priority. In Task Force, you will never see a multi-task student-manager who processes orders, selects translators, and even translates in their leisure time. Our managers communicate with customers, and the production department performs the order, whereas legal professionals usually require not just a translation but also editing, proofreading, and expert proofreading by a lawyer. It usually also includes multi-column DTP, notary services, as well as an apostille and legalization. It proves the power of a multilingual team – translators and editors with a degree and experience in the legal industry, who work with 100+ language pairs.
Legal translation is an issue of great responsibility! Mistakes here may be very costly. One idle mouse click – and the agreement amount may increase (or decrease) ten times. A clumsy layout may hide important parts of text in a two-column document. Improper processing may not only distort the content but also replace the core idea of the document with the opposite one. In any case, poor quality of work is generally dangerous. Therefore, legal translation requires extra attention to detail and carefulness.
Peculiar features of legal translation
There is a high-quality legal translation in Kyiv as the city hosts several of the largest law faculties in Ukraine, with even the National Linguistic University having a law department. People working on legal translation should understand the matter in question. Both the translator and the editor should have a law degree. This will allow us to avoid cases when, for example, the legal translator has to invent the wording of the reverse Ukrainian Civil Code translation instead of finding the sources and copying the proper text.
Legal translation experts must know how to use and where to find primary sources. Therefore, research skills involving search engines are important not only for legal professionals but also for industry translators and editors.
The legal text translation requires attention: for legal professionals, not only quotation marks (Ukrainian or English) are important but also apostrophes (they differ as well); moreover, legal professionals are not happy when people confuse dashes with hyphens. These things are not included in the glossary; thus, translators and editors have to undergo constant training to remember these significant details.
Glossaries with key terms are often compiled to process legal texts. Major language service companies, such as Task Force, employ terminologists to compile glossaries. These are translators who are highly attentive and in love with lexicology.
Team
Team composition is crucial for ensuring high-quality translation of legal documents. Translators without law degrees may work on standard documents, like powers of attorney, extracts and abstracts from registers, and general agreements entered into under Ukrainian law. However, to process court rulings and complex agreements drawn up under foreign law, you will need a qualified legal translator from English. Or an expert legal translator working with any other language pair.
Price of legal translation
The rate depends on the number of manual quality checks. For example, the standard package, which is usually offered for similar tasks in Kyiv, includes the work of a legal translator and proofreading by an editor. Depending on the document’s complexity, the work may be performed by both young (standard legal translation of documents) and qualified legal translators from English or in any other language pairs. The full version (under the ISO 17100 international translation standard) of the legal translation process involves a translator, an editor, a legal expert, and a proofreader.
Tools to perform a high-quality legal translation
Task Force managers always ask the customer the translation purpose as it determines what it should be like. The standard version of processing with proofreading by an editor is recommended for quick and formal submission of documents, where the production department may use both artificial intelligence and manual work. Documents to be reviewed in a foreign court, most likely, should be processed not only involving editing but also proofreading, as well as expert verification and proofreading by a native speaker as such materials will be carefully studied. Firstly, tools for a high-quality legal translation include a glossary with all the terms, as well as a translation memory that is constantly saved and structured.
The managers of the Task Force language service company will recommend the type of legal document processing to choose to get the best quality and price ratio. We believe that this will be an important criterion for legal entities to select translation services.