I recently attended a talk top legal translator and founder of Intermark Language Services Tom West gave on French-English contract translation at the SFT Summer University for Financial Translation held in Paris in July.
Tom addressed a number of misconceptions concerning the translation of contracts that are likely to be of interest to translation clients and service providers. He touched on three main areas:
- His approach to translating contracts
- Terminological pitfalls to be aware of
- The issue of style
According to the conventional wisdom, contracts must be translated word for word, and, due to the legal nature of the documents, the translation must remain strictly in line with the original. While Tom agrees that contracts are not an appropriate place for translators to exercise unbridled creativity, his method differs significantly from the literal, word-for-word approach to translation. Instead, he advocates researching authentic contracts in the source and target languages to identify equivalences between the standard clauses and terms, thus producing a translation that not only communicates the original information accurately, but that is also written in a way that makes sense and sounds “natural” to the target-language legal professionals who will ultimately be using the translation.
Key take-aways:
So, where can translators find sample contracts? The Internet is a good place to start. For things like end-user license agreements, terms of sale, banking agreements, etc., look for authentic source- and target-language examples on corporate Web sites. Tom also mentioned the book Modèles de contrats en anglais by Olivier d’Auzon, with the caveat that the English translations are “a disaster!” Coming soon Part II: Terminological Pitfalls
