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.
