Ways to Judge the Levels of Professionalism of a Legal Translation Company
Legal translators play the most pivotal role in translating the written word. Their work involves legal documents like patents, contracts, court documents, contract papers, etc. Hence, it is crucial to include proper knowledge of the legal and lawful precedents while doing the translation work. If you are looking for a legal translation company, you need to understand that legal translation is unlike general translation. The Law of any country is somewhat culture-dependent. Therefore, there will be legal terms and content relevant within the dominant legal system of the country from where the source document came from or originated.
There are so many ways you can judge the levels of professionalism of a company that is in the business of legal translation. The first such factor is the number of native speakers they have in their staff. It is about the language to which you are looking to translate the text. In some instances, you would find translation service providers to have 90 to 100% of native people in their team, and thus they are pretty proud of the same. However, never believe such a statistic blindly.
Check out customer reviews and find out the actual linguistic composition of the staff.
Do they translate regularly?
If it is not a provider of certified translation services Singapore, you need to find how frequently they do such work. Do they do it on an on and off basis? You need to keep in mind the industry standard. It means that the people working there must have around 3-5 years of experience in such work. These professionals must also have an impressive track record. If they can fulfill these criteria, you can be sure that they will do your work properly.
However, since this is a legal translation company in Singapore that we are talking about over here, merely being a native speaker may not always be sufficient.
The importance of specialization
You need to find a company that has people who specialize in the kind of work that you are looking to assign in this case. Let us say that the people assigned to your project specialize in patents. Now, if your work is in litigation, it is unlikely that they would not do the work properly. Experience – more than ability – could prove to be a hindrance in these cases.
To date, they have focused only on patents, and hence they do not know how to translate legal documents that specialize in other areas.
Never jump the gun
So, you should never be over-enthused just because a company has native speakers. There is so much more to legal translation. It is more than a mere translation task ensuring that there are no issues with the flow of the language. It is always better to get a sneak preview of their career profiles in these cases. After all, these are crucial documents that we are talking about over here, and you cannot let them fall into the wrong hands.
Conclusion
These days, you have many companies that work with translators from all around the world. So, even if you think that you are working with a comparatively small firm, you may be working with one just as powerful as a significant organization in this domain.
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