There is a common misconception that legal translation is simply the practice of looking up each word in a document in a dictionary and replacing it with the recommended equivalent. Yet, from the Latin translatio — to “carry across” — the essence of legal translation is in carrying three essential things across the language barrier: the rules of law, the relevant facts, and the professional practices for managing them. Because most educational systems do not teach this skill and virtually nobody learns it, most legal translation work is actually done by unqualified amateurs. In this article, I’ll share the story of how I was once one of these unqualified amateurs being made to overbill clients to learn the art of legal translation on the job. After reflecting on that dysfunctional organizational practice, I’ll explain what legal translation looks like when it’s done right.
My Experience
In my earlier experience, legal translation was something that principally occurred in the law firm environment. Here, we as attorneys handled client matters and worked in the framework of a traditional legal process. One obvious distinctive part of the law firm environment is the very high level of access to information. When a client matter began, we held meetings and prepared memoranda running many pages long that summarized every detail of the case, and lawyers reviewed thousands of pages relating to the matter. We interacted with clients in both English and other languages, and explanations of the case had to carry over into either language.
Very often, we would translate documents for clients at the rate of several hundred dollars per hour. Corporations often preferred this approach; for example, they would present a Chinese language contract and request an English version be prepared from top to bottom by a lawyer. Sometimes, documents would be sent to a translation company to cut costs, but the results were extremely poor.
Nobody gives this much thought, but if a lawyer is translating at 200 words per hour and charging $350 per hour, their per-word rate is almost $2.00, whereas a translator might charge $.10 a word. So, the law firm is actually investing about twenty times the financial resources in the contract. Thus, law firms would avoid professional translators whenever possible.
Across hundreds of audits of legal documents done by language service providers (LSPs), I found that over 99.5% were copied from Google Translate or, later, AI tools like ChatGPT with no human revision. LSPs would often sit on the documents for several days to make it look like they were hard at work. While clients got a 95% discount, they got a 100% reduction in quality; the only real thing being sold was a documented process of where various promises and commitments were made.
The lack of translator education and preparation for professionals employed by translation companies also poses a distinct challenge. For one major cross-border case, I recall an LSP’s best candidates were people working on passion projects: one was writing a novel and actually became famous later, another was translating Buddhist religious texts, and a third was a literature translator who later pursued a China studies PhD. None of their very best translators had ever studied law, worked in a legal environment, or had a clue about the legal process. Most genuinely believed that simply making up nonsense words and phrases instead of using the real English words for things was acceptable. After all, these were all artists whose passions revolved around fiction and creativity.
A second problem in the LSP process is that they promise one- or two-day turnarounds and split documents up among a dozen or more translators. Unlike lawyers, translators receive no briefing on the case and are not paid to understand what they are working with. Most believe that the translations are a mere formal requirement and that nobody would ever read them. They also know that the lowest rates bring the most work, and that AI could do the work instantly. Strangely, law firm translation departments follow the exact same pattern of behavior, charging 1/20th the cost of lawyers and likewise copying AI, probably because of competitive pressure and lack of coordination. An underlying reason may be that translation is charged by the word, not by the hour. So, translator workflows emphasize minimizing the amount of time spent, while workflows for lawyers who bill by the hour emphasize maximizing the amount of time spent.
Law Firms Churned the Translation Bill
Law firms, therefore, have two great reasons to keep translation in-house using lawyers: outside “professionals” can’t do it because they will send back unedited AI, and in-house translation can be used to churn a bill for huge amounts of money. I remember working at a large law firm that billed a client some $500,000 for translation of litigation documents done by a whole legal team over two weeks. This was done using zero translation technology and with no training; most of the terminology was also mistranslated and guessed from internet searches. In other words, the translation was done by untrained amateur translators. In New York, some Chinese-speaking associates spent most of their time on translation, churning bills to incredible heights.
I’m sure I must have billed clients millions of dollars during my legal translation apprentice phase. The stakes and standards here are incredibly low. Since it’s not legal work, partners won’t review a translation unless it directly affects a case outcome, and there are no quality assurance standards or oversight at all. Partners are more interested in justifying a high bill without spending their own time and legal expertise on the matters. Thus, associates are held to much lower standards than translators charging 1/20th of their rates.
What Is Legal Translation?
Beyond mere document translation, many lawyer activities actually constitute translation even when labeled as traditional legal work. For example, suppose a client wants to set up a chemical plant in China under relaxed rules in the future and asks who should serve as the company’s statutory representative.
Here’s a quick primer on statutory representatives for chemical manufacturers. First, statutory representatives have statutory liability and responsibility for work safety at the plant. If an incident like the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster happens, where safety resulted in criminal liability, they can face criminal charges. Secondly, the statutory representative can sign any documents on the company’s behalf. This role is often very misleadingly translated as “legal representative” because Chinglish does not distinguish the concept of “statutes” from general “laws,” thus hiding the massive statutory liability involved. Someone like a local entity president would be appropriate as a statutory representative, given the kind of power the position carries and the strict financial controls, partner due diligence, and access to the corporate seal necessary.
If you explain the role under Chinese corporate law to a client, or even to one of your dear readers, then you are already doing a lot of translation. While a lot of creativity is involved because the statutes and case law are in Chinese, everything you can be told about this role requires taking phrases and concepts from Chinese and carrying them over to English. Despite the lack of a word-for-word match, the translation across languages is undeniable. That also makes this sort of translation very unique compared to technical translation; in pharmaceuticals, you can look at a physical process and know how to describe it in another language. We call this a semiotic process. In legal translation, the words in a social context are the objective phenomena that produce real effects. That means, in law, translation is inescapable.
Thus, any sort of client memorandum, email, or conference call is going to involve an act of translation. Very often, I see lawyers who hardly have any grasp of English relying on copied templates or AI to serve clients, communicating about 80% less information compared to work done in their native language. Of course, the behavior is not limited to lawyers; doctors and auditors act in the exact same way. The amount of information conveyed shrinks drastically or is heavily distorted by AI tools when someone not trained for translation is asked to do anything bilingual. A law professor at an “international law” school recently lamented to me that only one out of hundreds of students had any interest in working on English-based projects while in school. Attitudes change a bit after they get into practice. At a legal conference, one international lawyer gave a speech on why clients should be more accepting of the “amazing” Google Translate software.
Nonetheless, this kind of behavior among so-called professionals should be highly alarming for any attentive and quality-focused client. Let’s recap what behavior has been reported:
- Bill churning for work they are not qualified for
- Using unreliable AI to pretend that real work has been done
- Reducing actionable advice by about 80% to avoid complex topics
A lot of the above is straight-up malpractice. It’s also a very critical reason why China does not pursue cases of legal malpractice: any legal advice is considered better than none, and restricting incompetent advice might leave international clients without lawyers.
In short, lawyers are doing a tremendous amount of legal translation, even if using monolingual methods within the ESL or so-called “Legal English” framework. However, due to a lack of skill or specialization, the quality of their service to clients is severely compromised. Thus, these tasks would be much better handled by someone else.
Who Should Do Legal Translation?
In an ideal world, legal translation would be done by specialists who have significant training in the underlying knowledge and disciplines. A qualified legal translator is someone who has education and training in the law they are translating for in multiple jurisdictions and has strong language and translation skills. Training new talent requires a significant amount of time spent learning about pure law, though not as much about the practice of law. For example, negotiation, deposition taking, or jury persuasion are all critical practical skills that are not in themselves law. This focus on pure law is not unlike how a doctor needs to know about biology and chemistry, despite not being a biologist or chemist. Translation, like negotiation or jury persuasion, is very much a practical skill that is highly dependent on language proficiency and subject matter knowledge. These are the main barriers to competence.
However, qualified legal translators are rarely used, and untrained amateurs do most of the work. The existence of poorly qualified practitioners is not an unusual phenomenon in any profession. For instance, in many developing countries, informal physicians and surgeons care for patients despite limited skills. Individuals often do their own accounting and tax filings without a trained and qualified accountant, and plenty of pro se litigants turn up to court without an attorney to navigate litigation.
The typical justification for doing so is scarce resources, but the real motivation among law firms is the ability to bill a whole lot more law associate hours at highly leveraged rates for low-quality work that clients do not need. These bills do cause client anxiety and are perceived as not adding value. At one point, after seeing the bills, a China corporation’s general counsel cornered me, then a lowly associate, and asked whether our team was billing hours for afternoon karaoke sessions. Yet when law firms outsource translations, they get Google Translate back. What is to be done here?
One solution that has come to mind for me is for translators to work strategically with lawyers and other professionals to provide an integrated, rather than outsourced, service for clients. By integrating the services, the translation aspect of the legal service can be aligned to serve client needs. Moreover, results-based pricing for complete solutions, rather than per-word pricing, can also deliver more value for clients. This is because translation costs for a particular legal matter plummet the larger the matter is, but the contribution to the client remains the same. Thus, instead of being a linear, per-word outsourcer in a management silo, translators should become per-solution integrated partners in business teams that provide integrated legal, tax, linguistic, and advisory support to drive business success. Rather than an appendage to a larger business process kept in an isolated silo, translators could serve as a bridge across cultures and connect local and foreign-language expertise to business clients’ needs and strategic intent.
