Legal translations in English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian.

• Do I need to use a professional legal translator?

A translated legal document remains, for all intents and purposes, a legal document. A small mistake in a legal translation can have serious consequences. Don’t risk your reputation. Legal documents must be translated by lawyers.

• Which languages do you work in?

Our policy is to work in the business languages in which we possess expertise and in which we can assess the skills of our translators: for this reason we only offer the major European languages: English, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian.

• The document I need translating is a contract which contains text of a technical nature. Can you accommodate my needs?

Our lawyer translators are skilled at translating legal documents but may lack necessary subject matter expertise in other technical areas. We may therefore split certain jobs between two translators, assigning the technical portion to a technical translator before reassembling the finished document.

• Do you offer any services other than legal translation?

We prefer to focus on our core competence, an area in which we have established a solid reputation and best practices. That said, for our regular customers we translate more generic business texts in addition to financial documents.

• How do I pay?

Currently there are two payment options: Paypal and bank transfer. We shall shortly be adding credit card payment.

• Do you require pre-payment?

Individuals are required to pay up-front once our quote has been accepted whereas for corporate clients the payment term is 30 days from invoice date.

• Do I have to pay Value Added Tax?

VAT is only applied if you are in Italy or outside the European Union

• How long does it take to translate a document?

Many factors may come into play, including the amount of industry-specific terminology contained in the document, but an experienced translator is able to translate around 3,000 to 4,000 words per day. With regard to the quality assurance stage, an experienced editor can review around 7,000 words per day. In ideal circumstances a 6,000 word translation would thus require two days. Shorter timeframes are quite possible but we would sometimes need to apply a rush-job surcharge due to the fact that such round-the-clock projects are shared amongst more than one translator before being reassembled. This type of translation involving multiple translators requires constant monitoring to ensure terminological and stylistic consistency. Our “record” is a translation of a 35250 word pleading over one weekend.

• How do I contact you?

You may telephone, send an email or use the chat function, all of which are on the home page. Your enquiry will be answered by an English native speaker.

• How much does it cost to translate a document?

Please refer to the “Prices” page.

• Do I need to supply reference material?

Reference material is not necessary but it can speed up the translation process as conducting research into industry-specific terms can be time-consuming. Reference material would include diagrams, previous translations and client-specific glossaries containing proprietary terms and acronyms.

• Why is the quote based on more words than in the original document?

Translations (target texts) are commonly up to 15/20% longer than the original document (source text). Abbreviations and acronyms may need to be spelt out; for example “articolo 117 c.c.” in Italian would be translated as “article 117 of the civil code” whilst cultural references may need to be explained in greater detail. Our quote therefore takes into account such language expansion.