Last month I attended the Dual German / English Contracts Workshop with Rebecca Smith and Angela Sigee at ITI HQ in Milton Keynes. Strictly speaking I don’t ‘do’ legal translation, but for a direct client I have been doing some licensing agreements and legal letters, so I thought that this workshop might give me some useful hints and tips. I wasn’t disappointed!
Some of the main takeaways for me were:
• Who is the translation for? Probably a judge or lawyer, not a layperson as you might expect, so technical language doesn’t need to be explained or avoided.
• Although plain English is favoured, some legalese has particular meanings which can be useful or purposeful. For example: may, shall, hereby – so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if these expressions don’t change the meaning, just use them!
• Always a tricky one: shall. If you’re not sure if you should use it, try the obligation test – are you expressing ‘have a duty to’? If your sentence still makes sense when you replace shall with have a duty to, you’re using it properly.
• You should try and turn German passive verbs into English active verbs where possible unless it sounds aggressive as an active verb.
RESOURCES
Rebecca gave us some fantastic resources; one for me to read further is this eBook by Rob Lunn (www.legalspaintrans.com): http://www.legalspaintrans.com/wp-content/uploads/book/A_Systematic_Approach_to_Translating_Contracts_into_English.pdf
And this great quick reference from Adams On Contract Drafting (www.adamsdrafting.com ):
http://www.adamsdrafting.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/CoCL-Quick-Reference-2-February-2017.pdf
Overall, an invaluable workshop – I’ve already used some of the expressions we covered when looking at some sample contracts in our groups.
If you want to learn more about the workshop, look out for my write-up in the next issue of the ITI Bulletin in July!
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