Machine Translation and Law - A Good Match?

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In addition to all other duties, lawyers must take reasonable steps to communicate with clients who may encounter language barriers. This is stated in the official advice of the American Bar Association (ABA) in its statement of October 2021. 

 This is a two-way request. Lawyers should strive to ensure that clients with limited English proficiency have sufficient information to effectively participate in decisions about their representation, while also ensuring that legal counsel can obtain sufficient information from their clients. 

In this context, lawyers with language barriers must use the necessary technical resources to guarantee open communication channels. Traditionally, translators (for written documents) and interpreters (for oral communication) are called in as required, often Court-certified and paid by the legal system. A third leg has recently been added to this linguistic support: machine translation (MT), as acknowledged by the ABA: 

 ” … a lawyer should arrange for communications to take place through an impartial interpreter or translator, capable of comprehending and accurately explaining the legal concepts involved, and who will assent to and abide by the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality. The lawyer also should use other assistive or language-translation technologies, when necessary.” 

Formal Opinion 500, 2021: Language Access in the Client-Lawyer Relationship 

Lawsuits Lost in Translation … 

The decision on whether or not to summon a linguist lies with the lawyer. However, the ABA recommends that its members act with an abundance of caution. This often means convincing clients with limited English skills that relying on bilingual friends or relatives is not an effective way of dealing with complex legal matters that often use technical terminology. 

A hostage to exact wording, international litigation may be won or lost through unclear testimony or clumsy contracts, where even a misplaced comma can cost millions of dollars. Here are four very expensive translation mistakes: 

Ecuador paid USD 1.76 billion to Occidental Petroleum Corporation for breaching a farmout agreement, due largely to ill-translated documents and judgments. 

Baby formula blooper cost Mead Johnson around USD 10 million in recalled packs with incorrect instructions in Spanish; 

Intoxicated is not intoxicado: a mistranslation of the Spanish word for food poisoning led to a USD 71 million malpractice settlement for a quadriplegic teenager; 

 … and How to Avoid Them 

 All of these disastrous consequences could have been avoided, if the initial translations had been properly prepared by qualified professionals. The difference in price of a few dollars per page or per hour is negligible, but the difference in probable outcomes is glaringly obvious. 

 The surest way to avoid costly translation mistakes like these is to make sure that important documents and crucial conversations are translated by certified professionals who are not only bilingual, but also bicultural. This is where a certified language service provider (LSP) like Idiomatic USA pays off. Working only with qualified native linguists, every word is checked against the original text for flawless accuracy. 

 Law, language and loopholes 

Accuracy is essential for legal translation. Translators must not only comply with the rules of the target language, but also understand the structure of other legal systems. This means developing a reasonable understanding of legal and regulatory concepts, looking for parallels and adding explanatory notes where necessary. 

Translation tasks become even more complex when bridging the gaps between widely varying cultures and legal systems. In the West, legislations underpinned by the Napoleonic Code or Roman Law are very different from Civil or Customary Law. Elsewhere in the world, many countries have legal systems subject to strict religious tenets, while others are steered by tribal traditions.

Pitfalls and Perils of Machine Translation 

A recent (2021) translation payment decision handed down by a Polish Court raised two significant issues (among several others) related to machine translation: 

Quality: The Court found the translation (machine translated and purportedly post-edited) unfit for professional use, with negligent and incomplete post-editing; 

Confidentiality: Using Google Translate constituted a gross violation of contractual provisions on confidentiality, breaching the intellectual property rights held by the client. 

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure

The bottom line seems clear: when it comes to translation, there are no shortcuts or bargains. From disastrous to comical, the risks of bad translation always outweigh the benefits. Invariably, all the work has to be redone by a certified professional and reviewed by a professional agency, which means (at least) double the time and cost. 

Takeaway : The smart move is to play it safe and stay professional by getting a custom quote for each job from an experienced language service provider. Get in touch with Idiomatic USA for a quote, knowing that your documents are in good hands.

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