BS ISO 20771-2020 Legal translation一Requirements.
For the purpose of this document, the distinction should be noted between legal translation in general and authorized legal translation In particular:
a) legal translation refers to any law-related or legal specialist field translation. This typically covers translation of agreements, contracts, acts of law, powers of attorney, notarial deeds, court decisions, financial statements, registration documents or any other legal documents which do not require translation certification by an authorized legal translator but should be translated by a legal translator who specialises in translating this type of content and context, and provides translation services within this specialist field;
b) authorized legal translation refers to specialized translation performed by officially authorized legal translators (who in some countries or regions are also referred to as court appointed translators, sworn translators, court authorized legal translators or certified legal translators) and the certified translation output they provide has the status of officially recognized documents. This typically covers translation of personal documents, certificates, documents used in court and administrative proceedings and any other personal of corporate documents that require certification and signing off by an officially authorized legal translator using personal signature, electronic signature, official seal or other officially recognized methods.
It should be noted that the quality of legal translation is highly dependent on the competences, qualifications and experience of the individual legal translator who has to rely on many resources and reference documents. In some situations, machine translation might be used by a human translator as one of the resources available, within a CAT tool or a TMS for example, and the translator may choose to use or ignore such resources (on term or segment basis) and make informed decisions as to using such material or rejecting it. Consulting of an MT resource by a legal translator does not constitute use of raw machine translation plus post-editing.
5 Competences and qualifications
5.1 Required competences of legal translators
Legal translators shall have the following competences.
a) Translation competence: the ability to translate specialist legal content, including the ability to address the problems of specialist language content comprehension and production, and the ability to render the target language content in accordance with the project specifications, using the correct language register, specialist terminology and taking into account other aspects of legal translation specialization.
b) Linguistic and textual competence in the source language and the target language: the ability to fully understand the source language, fluency in the target language, and knowledge of specialist genre conventions, language registers, legal collocations and terminology in both the source and target language. The linguistic and textual competence includes the ability to apply this knowledge and specialist legal terminology when producing legal translation.
c) Specialist legal field competence: the ability to understand specialist legal content produced in the source language and to reproduce it in the target language, using the appropriate up-to- date specialist legal language register, genre conventions, terminology and style. If required and authorized to do so, a legal translator should have the knowledge of proper procedure for certifying a translation.
d) Competence in research, information acquisition and processing: the ability to efficiently acquire additional specialist legal knowledge or source documents and terminology necessary to understand and process specialist source language content, to produce the legal specialist target language content, and to critically assess the credibility and reliability of all the resources. Research competence also requires experience in the use of research tools and search engines, the ability to develop suitable specialist termbases and strategies for the efficient use of the information sources available, evaluation of their relevance and credibility in a given context, and source. If required,C ISO 2020 – Au rights reserved to be capable of providing information about the requirements for legalization or authorization of translated legal documents.
e) Legal culture competence: ability to make use of information on behavioural standards, value systems, understanding of legal procedures and systems, language registers and locale that characterize both source and target language legal cultures and are relevant to the specializations and settings that the legal translator is dealing with as well as ability to understand the distinction and cultural and factual implications behind different legal systems and approaches (intersystemic, intrasystemic or acultural).BS ISO 20771 pdf download.