Category: Insurance translation

It’s a fact of life that mistakes happen. Sometimes they are caused by human error, sometimes by operator error (that’s still human error, right?) and sometimes they just happen for inexplicable reasons.

However, mistakes made as a result of not understanding subject matter are, at best, embarrassing, and, at worst, cause great financial loss to clients.

Last week, we were called upon to fix up a translation project which had been conducted by a non-specialist agency. I have no desire to point fingers or blame but wish to reiterate a point that we make consistently: translations should be undertaken by subject experts only. I wouldn’t ask my dentist to take a look at my suspension nor my mechanic to fit braces.

In the end, we had to bill the client for our time in almost re-writing the original work. This means that they would have paid at least twice for what should essentially have been the same work.

It’s not just the understanding of the topic which is important, it is the understanding of the industry. The majority of our legal translators are former lawyers. As such, they understand:

• confidentiality of translated documents;
• the importance of deadlines;
• that everything needs to be double checked (twice!); and
• attention to detail is everything in a legal translation.

We don’t make this point for the sake of marketing spin. It is a well-established rule that legal translations should only be undertaken by those who really “get it”. Of course, we are all human and we have made errors in our work in the past and we have missed some deadlines (only a couple, mind you!) but in order to maximise the likelihood of a piece of legal translation work being completed correctly the first time, we would suggest that you only use legal translation specialists. Otherwise, that contract or judgment may end up costing twice as much to translate.

If you have any tricky legal translation work that you’d like us to look at, feel free to contact us.

Linguistico

We receive about 40 CVs per week from translators looking to join our team of translators. As an estimate, I think we accept just under one application out of every 40. Here is why…

We specialise in legal translation and insurance / reinsurance translation. That’s it. We do this because it means that we can be really, really good in these specific subject areas and, as a result, attract high quality law firm and insurer clients.

Many translators who contact us clearly haven’t read our website or found out anything about what we do. Unfortunately, if a translator specialises in tourism translation or oenology, while those are both excellent topics, we won’t be able to work with them as we just don’t receive work or undertake translation work in those subject areas.

In addition, we often receive applications from translators who claim some or all of the following:

• Native language English. The application then goes on to detail an education, including higher education, received in a country of which English is not the native language. While some of these applications are written incredibly well and the level of English is very high for someone who was not brought up in an English-speaking country, the quality is just not high enough to deal with, for example, complex legal translation work.
• Attnetion to detail. Exactly. The above example of “Public Crevice Interpreting”, while amusing, was pulled out of a CV yesterday and stood glaringly on the page. The applicant in question is an incredibly experienced, highly-educated individual but errors like this make me, as a translation buyer, question the ability to complete an error-free translation – which is what our clients value.
• Expertise in legal translation work. However, when you review the CV in full, it is clear that the applicant has some experience in translating, for example, driving licences for immigration law firms. Again, this is a valuable skill and one which is essential for many translators in obtaining “bread and butter” work. But, in my view, this is not expertise. Expertise comes through post-graduate study, practising as a lawyer before becoming a translator, or extensive exposure to legal translation work over many years.

So my advice would be, check and double check your CV before sending it to a translation company – it is your sales tool and the reason why you would be asked to work on a job in preference to another translator. Don’t overclaim your translation expertise – this will soon be discovered at a reference checking or test stage in any event. Check that your experience is relevant to the translation company you are applying to – if you don’t do legal or insurance translation work, then think carefully before applying to us or any other translation agency specialising in this area. The matching of the right translator to the right job is essential at our end and translators can greatly help themselves and us by engaging in frank discussion of strengths, weaknesses and areas of interest.

We look forward to your application!

Linguistico

Without wishing to “big ourselves up” too much, we are regularly asked by clients to fix up a translation mess. This has usually come about as a result of clients seeking to obtain translation work from other translation companies at the lowest possible cost. In fact, this search for cheap translation work has been a noticeable difference between the Australian and UK markets since we opened in Europe in 2010.

Of course, in a global marketplace, translations can be completed very cheaply indeed. There is a ready supply of translators in South America who will translate a document from Spanish to English, for example. The problem is that English is not their mother tongue and they may never even have visited the UK so, while this may seem like a cheap solution, it may not be a very good idea to rely on such a translator when dealing with a contract, judgment or insurance policy.

However, cheap translations can have some pretty catastrophic results. As we have seen in recent months in the UK, translators are people. They are not an inanimate good. They have high-level skills, usually obtained through years of study and practice. They take one document in one language, immerse themselves in it for a number of days or weeks, step into the shoes of the author and the audience and then produce that document in their native language at the end of the process. This is a skill, an art and a science all rolled into one.

The recent example of the Ministry of Justice Framework Agreement has been a clear illustrator of the cost of not undertaking enough due diligence and / or agreeing to use the cheapest translation service available:

Trials collapse as interpreter shortage cripples the court… whose reliance on Google Translate is ‘putting the public safety at risk’

MPs take evidence on interpreting and translation services

Does this really represent a cost saving? My view (and probably now the view of the MoJ) is that it doesn’t.

This growing appetite in the UK for cheap translation services has led to another alarming trend in the translation market. Good translators are getting out. Most of the people we work with are real experts. It amazes me every time I read their work how good they really are. Given the choice of having their rates of pay hammered down by the free market’s search for low-cost translations, a few have opted to go back into legal practice, a few have chosen to retire and a few have changed career altogther. I don’t think this is a positive thing for the translation market and will only result in a downward spiral of quality. We have all seen the full circle in many other industries, including banking, so I am sure there will come a time when clients realise there is a need for lawyers to translate legal documents and insurance experts to translate insurance documents (you could extrapolate that in any number of industries including medicine). However, there will be some painful learning experiences for clients who see translation as a place where they can save costs by doing things cheaply.