Challenges Faced By Providers Of Legal Translation Services

Shakti Enterprise
3 min readOct 10, 2023

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The translation of legal documents is not an easy affair. Legal translators and agencies would need to make sure that they have next level understanding of the target language. Furthermore, the legal translators and agencies that are revered also tend to remain up-to-date with local, national and international laws as well as legislation.

Why legal translation is regarded as an important service?

Well, as per the professional opinion of a legal translator associated with a revered provider of legal translation services, even a miniscule translation or localization-related mistake can cause –

  • One to get their immigration request denied
  • A brand to lose a course case
  • A business to be slapped with a hefty legal fine
  • An inventor to get their patent or IP court proceeding thrown out!

What are the most common challenges legal translators face in a project?

Even though legal translators are always honing their skills, even the best linguists associated with the sector of legal translation tend to face quite a few challenges associated with the legal translation projects they handle daily.

Some of the most common challenges that entail a typical legal document translation project are highlighted in the sections below.

Keeping legal translators up-to-date with the ever-changing legal norms and regulations is tough

The CEO of a revered agency specializing in providing legal translation services in Mumbai points out that the legal translators under the payroll of their company are periodically subjected to in-house skill refresher sessions which is a huge undertaking even for the most reputed language service provider.

The monetary and time-related costs of subjecting employees to in-house skill refresher training sessions are huge (and challenging).

However, most revered language service providers offering legal document translation services do not mind the added costs of re-training their legal translation and localization experts since these professionals would catch up with the ever-changing local, national and international legal norms as well as regulations.

Legal translators cannot be flexible when it comes to word selection

No matter how skilled a linguist is when they are associated with the sector of professional legal translation services, they always have to remember that they cannot be flexible with word selection when they are localizing or translating a legal document.

The same goes for creativity. Legal documents cannot be localized or translated using creative sentences as that would lead to the loss of the intent and tone of the source document thus leading to confusion in court proceedings, penalties, counter lawsuits, etc.

Paying attention to syntax and punctuation is a complex affair even for seasoned legal translators

Legal translators associated with the top Indian legal translation company Shakti Enterprise point out that they find it very challenging to pay constant attention to the syntax as well as punctuation of the legal documents they are translating on behalf of their Indian or international clients.

Legal documents are often packed with pretentious and confusing terms

Legal translators also find it very difficult to comprehend legal documents that are packed with pretentious as well as confusing terms that make it almost impossible even for seasoned legal translators to comprehend whole sentences in the source document especially if the source document has been marked for Bengali to Telugu translation. During such instances, the legal translator often fails to meet the deadline their client has assigned to the project in question.

Avail professional legal translation services at Shakti Enterprise

Shakti Enterprise holds ISO 9001:2015 management certification and DIN EN 15308 translation certification. The translation agency has been operating on a pan-India scale for decades. The translation agency also has a global network of talented (and certified) legal translators under its payroll that allows Shakti Enterprise to offer legal document translation services that are on par with global standards. For more details, please contact the language service provider today.

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Shakti Enterprise

Shakti Enterprise is a multilingual translation agency which provides professional language translation service in all the major Indian and Foreign languages.