Author: vladmin

About Ogier Ogier provides legal advice on BVI, Cayman, Guernsey, Irish, Jersey and Luxembourg law. Our network of locations also includes Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. Challenge: Complete a sworn translation of 360k words into German, French and Spanish within 5 business days. ‘That’s not possible’ is the typical response to such […]

Should law firms use legally trained translators to translate legal documents? A common misconception about translation is that a truly skilled translator will translate texts on any subject matter to the same high quality. Lawyers are thus often surprised when qualified translators do not deliver the quality expected. The notion that a good translator can […]

Ensuring the integrity of key evidence after translation Disputes are won and lost on the facts and the law. In most international disputes, factual evidence, applicable law, or both will often be in a language that differs from that of the lawyers and adjudicators. Their knowledge and understanding of the case will thus depend entirely […]

The Costs of Bad Translation to a Case As discussed in the previous blog, in most international cases much of the written evidence is both unveiled and, ultimately, presented to the adjudicator, through the work of translators. Nonetheless, it is not uncommon for lawyers to make translations a low priority in their case work, and […]

A good illustration of the ways in which poor legal translation may affect the outcome of an international dispute is the ICSID arbitration of Occidental Petroleum v Ecuador.  The dispute concerned the expropriation of a petroleum investment, and the USD1,77 billion damages award issued by the tribunal on October 5, 2012 was, at that time, […]

The costs of translation for a law firm and its clients are not only the per-word fee charged by most translation companies, but also the billable time spent by legal staff managing and reviewing translations (including billable time foregone for other, more substantive, legal work). Legal translation is an expensive service, but its costs will […]

Tips on Best Practice: Handling Urgent and Large Translation Requests Effectively The volume of foreign language documents that needs to be translated in the course of international proceedings can, at times, be overwhelming. Managing those volumes to ensure that the translations are suitable for submission on time and in full can be a major challenge, […]