I’m sure we have all found ourselves in a situation where the jargon in a document has made our heads spin. Our legal translators are often faced with texts like this, but thankfully they have the terminological knowledge and experience to deal with them. Legal translation services is an area of the industry that is often looked upon with trepidation, as there are so many different considerations.

Take for example, the translation of legal documents for an English customer who is taking up residency in France. It may seem straight forward, once the terms have been identified and translated, but the conventions are much more difficult to work with. According to French succession law, children (biological of legally adopted) are entitled to a certain ‘reserved’ portion of a parent’s estate. This means that a French will can only control the distribution of the remaining portion, in contrast to the will of a UK citizen. Legal translation services must provide the customer with documents which are fit for purpose in the target language and culture, taking into account any legal points to be observed, such as the one mentioned above.

To summarise, in order to provide quality legal translation services, we take every care to ensure that our legal translators know their specialist area thoroughly. This is absolutely vital to give our customers exactly what they need.

Finally, on a lighter note, we have found this fine piece of gobbledegook (a fantastic word itself!), which we would love to know if someone can decipher. Can you tell us what this means in standard English?

A ptitsa in the finest of platties was goolying along a river one hot summer’s day, smecking at the ducks and generally thinking life was real horrorshow, when a group of nadsats ittied by. The ptitsa was suddenly poogly to slooshy the nadsats’ conversation, how they had crasted a ded’s otchkies whilst he was sleeping, and then sold they dorogoy otchkies and used the money for peeting and other jollifications. The ptitsa decided these grazzy nadsats must be bezoomy, and ran away skorry-like clutching her shlapa to her Gulliver. “What utter chepooka!”, she messeled to herself.

For more information about our language services in the legal sector, please visit our legal translation services page.