Category: legal language

Many lawyers seem to think they can just press a button and technology will miraculously produce a useable translation they can present to clients to aid understanding of legal provisions or help those clients grasp what their rights and obligations are.

Much has been written about how writing in simpler language makes it easier for the machine to “translate”.

Except, of course, legal language is hardly ever simple and straightforward. Words and concepts are connected to other provisions and concepts in a complicated web of meaning. And that meaning needs to come across in the translated version of the legal text. Unsurprisingly, machines fail a lot in relation to this.

But what if there are mistakes in the legal text?

Machines can’t identify mistakes. If the person reading the translated version doesn’t know the language the original document was written in, and isn’t expert in the relevant area of law, they may not be able to spot those issues. The lawyer who pressed the “translate” button may not be able to spot them either.

And talking of lawyers and law professionals not spotting things, I wanted to share some thoughts on errors in legal documents (be they contracts, articles of associations, pleadings, judgments, legislation, etc.), which are the sort of things we at Jurtrans typically translate.

Errors in Greek legal documents are very common.

Much more common than you’d imagine.

In 2024 we translated 946 Greek legal documents into English.

An astonishing 95% of them contained one or more errors of various types.

That’s a lot of errors.

And a lot of comments from us pointing out the errors and oversights in the Greek texts.

Getting an error-free legal text for translation from Greek to English really is the exception rather than the rule in our experience.

And many of those errors can have significant consequences if they aren’t spotted in time. More of which at another time …

To repeat the oft-heard phrase “no one reads a legal document as carefully as a legal translator”.  Machines certainly don’t have that capability because they simply match patterns, they don’t understand meaning.

So what sort of errors do we typically see?

  • Incomplete citations. For example, Article 95 is mentioned. But Article 95 of what? Of the contract the phrase appears in? Of the governing law? Of some other piece of legislation?  With our deep knowledge of Greek law we can often tell which piece of legislation is meant and can add a comment about that.
  • Incorrect citations. For example, the wrong governing legislation is cited, or the wrong article and paragraph number are cited, or the wrong judgment is cited.
  • Related to this, we frequently see legislation being cited that is no longer in force at the time the document was drafted. This happens a lot in company law texts when the old regime under Law 2190/1920 is cited despite the legislation being overhauled by Law 4548/2018.
  • Similarly, we often encounter numbers being reversed. Greek legislation has a numerical citation so (made up example) Law 1959/2008 could be cited mistakenly as Law 1995/2008.
  • Inconsistent paragraph / section numbering. Greek has its own unique numbering system based on Greek letters and characters. We often see lists omitting ‘στ’ (equivalent of ‘f) and going straight from ‘ε΄ το ‘ζ. Τhat can throw off the numbering scheme. It’s often the case that ‘στ’ is omitted at one location in the document but included in other locations. Likewise, we often see paragraph numbering jumping from say paragraph 3 to paragraph 5 with no paragraph 4 in between.
  • Another frequent problem is the drafting lawyer/judge mixes up who the parties are and what roles they hold. Plaintiff/claimant is confused with defendant at some point in the text, for example.
  • We often encounter sections of garbled text because of a copy-paste issue meaning part of a sentence is missing. The grammar / syntax is often messed up in this section of the text making it impossible to deduce what the correct intended meaning is.
  • Often there is a lack of logical flow in the argumentation or there are contradictions between what was said at the start of the text and what is said further down.
  • “Things left dangling” are quite frequent. For example a sentence may set up the logic of a disjunctive list (a or b) we only the information relating to ‘a’ is provided.
  • Subject-verb disagreement. Single subjects matched with plural verbs, or vice versa.
  • Single and plural nouns confused. Although the text refers to one buyer elsewhere it refers to several buyers.
  • Mistakes of fact, like saying such and such a place is in England when it is in Scotland.
  • Conflicting information in different parts of the text (for example a debt of a specific amount is mentioned at the start, but a higher / lower / other amount is mentioned further down)
  • Incorrect references to foreign legal documents.
  • On a related point, spelling mistakes in the English names of foreign legal acts or in foreign abbreviations, for example the General Rules for International Factoring being abbreviated as GRIP in the Greek text instead of GRIF.
  • Forgetting to consistently use “capitalised terms” that have been assigned a special meaning in the document.
  • Introducing capitalised terms that are nowhere defined in the document. For example in a lease defining the “Leased Property” in detail but then going on to call it the “Building”.
  • Related to the foregoing point, elegant variation in terms used, so an agreement is called just that (an “agreement”) in one paragraph, but is called a “contract” in another.
  • Use of incorrect terminology for the area of law or use of outdated terms that come from an older version of the legislation.
  • Ambiguously worded phrases where two or more possible intended meanings co-exist
  • Numbers written out in full do not match the numbers presented arithmetically.

Given our long years of professional experience in translating Greek legal texts into English, we can easily spot these errors and save egg on our clients’ faces. Machine translation and generative AI systems certainly can’t do that.

 

I’m all for technology. I use it all day, every day. But every technology has its limits (and its limitations).

Don’t we all wish that legal language was simple and straightforward and that you could just click a button and you’d have a clear understanding of what a foreign legal text actually says?

Then you’d know what your rights or obligations are.

You’d be able to converse intelligently with your legal counsel or your lawyer could explain things to you in terms you understand.

You’d be able to plan your next steps.

You’d know where you stand.

Nonetheless, 9 years after NMT went mainstream, and 2+ years after genAI was launched, legal language continues to confound technology.

By way of illustration, let’s take a sentence that would be straightforward for any Greek lawyer or experienced professional legal translator working in the Greek-English combination:

The Greek source text

The sentence may be straightforward. But behind it is someone who needs to show they have not been accused of something serious. The words may look innocent on the screen but the real-life implications are huge.

It’s vital to get the translation right.

You don’t want just any old translation.

You want an impeccable translation you can rely on.

How the tech performed

Google Translate gives us this piece of incomprehensible garbage. Remember Google Translate has been working on fine-tuning its neural machine translation engines for 9 years now.

The “English” translation according to Google Translate

– This is neither fluent nor accurate.

– Is employee even correct here? Is the text not actually referring to a “civil servant”?

– What does “occupied the service” even mean?

– The employee occupied the service “due to disciplinary or criminal offences”. What does that even mean?

– Holiday? αργία can mean public/official holiday yes, but in a completely different context. This is a bit like opening a dictionary, seeing 10 different meanings of a word, and picking the first. It might be correct in some context. Not this one.

In law, context is king.

DeepL gives us this rendering:

The “English” translation according to DeepL

– Again this is neither fluent nor accurate.

– Again we have to ask whether employee is the right choice of term here.

– Why is the “suspended from duty” idea now in the first part of the sentence when the Greek is referring to the fact that the department/unit the person works for has not had to handle any disciplinary/criminal complaints against that person?

– “Placed on leave”. Does that fully convey the concept of αργία? Or is it only covering part of the concept? αργία/argia means you are (i) stripped of the right to perform your duties + (ii) you only receive half your salary. “Placed on leave” really doesn’t cut it.

– Placed on “suspension from duty”. Grammatically does that stand in English? It’s beyond awkward and definitely doesn’t flow. Let’s say αναστολή here does mean that the person is suspended from duty. Is that with pay or without pay? How is this concept related to the previous one (αργία)? How does the “translation” differentiate between the two so that the reader actually understands what is going on?

Chatgpt 4.0gives us this:

The “English” translation according to Chatgpt

– This is again not fluent English. Nor is it accurate.

– As with the other versions we have to ask whether “employee” is the correct term.

– The first half of the sentence sort of conveys the meaning but omits quite an important bit of information (that the place where this person works has not had to handle complaints against them). Let’s say you get some general idea. In legal settings, do you really only want to walk away with “some general idea”?

– The second half of the sentence doesn’t fluently link to the second half.

– If αναστολή is the concept of “suspended” why does Chatgpt render αργία as “placed on suspension”? Does it draw an adequate distinction between the terms? From the viewpoint of Greek law, the two terms are quite distinct (related yes, but distinct). Let’s say there is an element of “suspension” in αργία, does the English rendering this tool offers accurately and fully convey what the Greek concept is saying? Or does it not omit a huge part of the meaning? What of the point we highlighted above concerning reduction in pay? How does that get conveyed by the wording chosen here?

Reality check

If you’re an ordinary individual using these tools to get some idea of what the Greek text is saying, can you hand-on-heart say you really understand the Greek after reading these “English” renderings?

If you’re a Greek lawyer who has to explain what is going on to a foreign client, can you hand-on-heart say these various “English” renderings adequately convey what the Greek text says?

Would you feel comfortable relying on them in a professional context?

With tools like these you may gain speed.

“Translations” may be available at the click of a button.

But are the “translations” actually useable?

If you need a translation to understand a legal text or you’re a lawyer who needs one in their legal work, use a specialist legal translator.

Reach out to us at Jurtrans Translations for impeccably accurate Greek-English legal translations.

The call for proposals for “Jurilinguistics III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” has been extended to 18 March.

If you work in the fields of legal translation/interpreting, and have something interesting to say about them, the training of legal translators, or terminology resources in those fields, do consider submitting a paper. The last two editions in Seville were great. The third edition will be in Cambridge later this year (1-2 October 2020). Jurtrans will be there, and hopefully I’ll be presenting a paper.

Ius et Translatum: English-Greek / Greek-English Legal Glossary – A review

Marta Chromá has written that “legal translation implies both a comparative study of different legal systems and an awareness of the problems created by the absence of equivalent concepts, legal institutions, terms and other linguistic units. As pointed out by Kischel … ‘the question in legal translation is not which translation is right, but more modestly, which one is less wrong’”[1].Continue Reading..

Launching a new series of interviews with legal translators and experts in the field of legal translation, we have an interview with Eleni Nanaki, Attorney at Law LL.M – author and publisher of the bilingual legal glossaries in the ius et translatum series who talks to us about challenges in legal translation as seen by an international lawyer…Continue Reading..

A couple of interesting talks on legal translation and court interpreting are coming up in the next few days and weeks…Continue Reading..

Stop press:

Making sense of adversarial interpreting – a seminarContinue Reading..

Tools of the legal translator’s trade, a new blog by me published today on the IALS Legal Translation hub looking at the various tools legal translators use in their profession.  Click here to read more:

Tools of the legal translator’s trade

The role of legal translators, and of legal translation as an activity, is attracting increasing attention, with a host of conferences having been organised on the subject or closely related topics in recent years.

I’ve recently returned from a very interesting and productive conference in Seville entitled, “From Legal Translation to Jurilinguistics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Language and Law” held at the Universidad Pablo   de Olavide in late October.

The recent conference in Seville emphasised the important role legal translators have to play

The recent conference in Seville emphasised the important role legal translators have to play

Some of the key themes that emerged at the conference for me were:

  • The vital communicative role that legal translators have to play

Prof. Jan Engberg, an expert in knowledge communication, stressed that legal translation is all about the translator being able to communicate specialised knowledge so that people (typically but not always lawyers) in one knowledge community can understand what is being said by people in another knowledge community. Legal translators mediate and broker the transfer of that knowledge and are interested in solving the linguistic problems that emerge in conveying knowledge. Their primary goal should be to create a text in the target situation that can be read in the right way by its audience. He stressed the importance of comparative law in this regard; which brings us to the next major theme at the conference.

  • The importance of comparative law skills for legal translators

Another broad theme at the conference was the importance of comparative law, and the importance of a transystemic approach to the study of law to enable legal translation to occur more easily because of greater understanding on the part of legal translators of what the concepts involved mean in, and across, legal systems; a topic addressed by Prof. Emerich in her keynote address.

  • How important it is for legal translators to correctly position themselves in the market

Building on the vital communicative role legal translators play, Juliette Scott, emphasised in her presentation the importance of legal translators correctly positioning themselves in the market, and stressed how important it is for legal translators to choose the correct terms when referring to themselves, primarily because of the impact this has on how the market perceives them as professionals.

  • The growing importance of corpuses for identifying language patterns and for aiding consistency and improving quality in legal translation

In her keynote speech Prof. L. Biel examined the historical development of corpuses in translation and discussed the importance of corpuses so far as a research tool. Since legal language is highly patterned and formulaic, corpuses are proving useful in identifying these patterns; though some translation studies have indicated that despite such high formulaicity, translators often have a tendency to use their own phrases rather than the patterns that would typically be used in corresponding target language texts. Somehow “translation as a process” is interfering. It is to be hoped that corpuses can be operationalised to ensure greater consistency across languages to improve translation quality. Gianluca Pontrandolfo also presented interesting corpus-based research on judicial phraseology, and several other speakers provided practical examples of how corpuses can promote better quality legal translations.

  • The need for better quality legal dictionaries

On a related point, several speakers analysed the difficulties one often encounters with legal dictionaries and presented projects aimed at creating better quality legal dictionaries or glossaries, presenting some interesting methodologies such as the ‘least bad possible equivalents’ for terms when two legal systems do not have the same concepts (Frison & Gavrilova) or a participative, interactive glossary-development process (Fiola).

  • The role of the EU’s directive on translation and interpreting in criminal settings

Several other papers addressed the progress made so far in adapting the law in various EU countries to the requirements of the recent directive on translation and interpreting in criminal settings, revealing that transposition has not always been a smooth process.

 

 

It is not just legal language that can be difficult to comprehend for the layman and legal translator alike. Often, it is the very content of legal texts that is strange. And the UK has no shortage of bizarre British laws if authors and journalists are to be believed.

From time to time books are published about England’s weird and wonderful laws. Nigel Crawthorne’s The Strange Laws of Old England (2004) is a hilarious case in point. And today the Guardian published a short story about a study commissioned by an insurance company that looks at whether obscure legislation is really needed. It offers a list of the 10 most bizarre British laws “to highlight the complexity and antiquity of statutes that remain in force”. The study has been prepared by a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge and -as is normally the case with lists or compilations of this type- contains some truly odd stuff.

Here are some short excerpts from the article:

“Section 12 of the 1872 Licensing Act declares that “every person found drunk … on any licensed premises, shall be liable to a penalty”. It was enacted to reduce consumption of alcohol and to encourage sobriety among the poor. It remains in force within England and Wales as a rule prohibiting public drunkenness.

The Metropolitan Police Act 1839 makes it an offence for any person to carry any cask, tub, hoop, wheels, ladders, planks or poles on a footway “except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage”. It was passed to ensure people could move freely along public thoroughfares without obstruction.

MPs are prohibited from wearing armour in parliament by the Bearing of Armour Act which dates back to 1313. It was an attempt by Edward II to prevent nobles from threatening to use force when parliament was called. The Earl of Lancaster, it was reported, still attended parliament carrying weapons until at least 1319.

… a different part of the 1872 Licensing Act … outlaws being drunk in charge of cattle; the 1986 Salmon Act – intended to ban poaching – makes it illegal to handle salmon in suspicious circumstances; a 19th-century law bans the beating of carpets after 8am on streets in London.”

To read the full article about these bizarre British laws, click here.

 

 


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