Editing for clarity: remove lexical and structural redundancies
Redundant words slow readers down and obscure key information. In technical and legal texts, redundancies can creep in owing to literal translations from other...
Editing for clarity: remove vague complex prepositions to improve readability
Vague complex prepositions like “in relation to” and “with regard to” add unnecessary complexity. This complexity hinders readability. This is something you can ill...
Daños doesn’t equal damages and the difference between damage and damages
Most of the time, daños means “damage”, in singular. What, then, is “damages” in Spanish? Usually something like indemnizaciones por daños y perjuicios, literally,...
Quick tip for translating contracts (5): build a clause library
Firstly, what is a clause library? Basically just a place (e.g., an Excel file) where you can store your preferred translations for typical clauses...
Quick tip for translating contracts (4): distinguish between formulaic language and contract information
Distinguishing between formulaic language and contract information is, I believe, the key to translating contracts and other formal legal documents. The only thing that...
Resources for translating contracts (5): Legal Writing in Plain English
Bryan Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English has some excellent tips for legal writing and writing general. It’s not about any one type of...
Pulling my head out of the sand and why so much on contracts lately
I’ve been talking about translating contracts a lot lately on this blog. You’d be surprised to know there’s actually a reason for it. Earlier...
Learn legalese and then forget it
In his book, Legal Writing in Plain English, Bryan A. Garner says law students should learn legalese and then learn not use it: When...
Quick tip for translating contracts (3): what tense where
In Basic Legal Drafting, Anne Rutledge makes a useful distinction between promissory and descriptive language: A promissory statement is one that “articulates a promise”...
Resources for translating contracts (4): Basic Legal Drafting
Basic Legal Drafting by Anne Rutledge covers three areas of legal drafting: litigation documents, contracts and legislative documents. I went straight for what interests...
Quick tip for translating contracts (2): don’t use “undertakes to”
According to Tiffany Kemp in her book Essential Contract Drafting Skills (spoken about here), we shouldn’t use “undertakes to” because it’s legalese with no...
Resources for translating contracts (3): Essential Contract Drafting Skills
Here’s another useful resource for translating contracts: Essential Contract Drafting Skills — a Practical Guide by Tiffany Kemp It’s a short book (doesn’t have...
Resources for translating contracts (2): the mother-of-all contract drafting books: MSCD
“Mother-of-all” might be an overstatement, as I’m sure there are other thick books out there on how to draft contracts in English, but this...
Quick tip for translating contracts (1): name the parties more often in English (and a point on ambiguity)
As noted in this resource I mentioned here the other day, Spanish contracts tend to use pronouns where English usually just repeats the party...
The rule of law / estado de derecho can of worms
Estado de derecho is often translated as “rule of law”, but the terms are not exact equivalents, as O’Donnell states in this paper that...
Plain English ATO style and the cut and shuffle of legal translations
Meandering about the Web the other day, I stumbled across this pearl of surrealness from the Australian Tax Office (ATO): For the purposes of...
A civil law dictionary and my dissertation topic
I just bought a new dictionary: Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary by Gregory W. Rome and Stephan Kinsella. So, what would a Spanish to UK-English...
Shall I or shall I not apply the ABC rule in my legal translations?
I recently stumbled across this interesting blog post that talks about, among other things, how shall is used in Australian contracts. According to something called...
Dahl’s Law Dictionary — a legal dictionary with a unique approach
I could have called this post “the review that made me buy a legal dictionary” because that’s exactly what the following words made me...
A plain Spanish campaign in Woolf’s clothing?
A Spanish government committee recently made a series of recommendations to legal bodies and practitioners—including the Spanish Bar Association, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and...
Em dashes and clarity in legal translation
Should we use the em dash in legal translation? Great for making complicated sentences less so, em dashes are described here as the “strongman...
