How to deliver multiple translated documents for lawyers in a short space of time?
Court deadlines are not for the faint-hearted. Evidence is often found at the eleventh hour. Add to that the need for urgent legal translations to English …
A recent case involved a particularly large volume of documents: annual reports, financial statements, project costings, agreements, construction information, tax vouchers, wechat messages and bank statements – some handwritten, a lot poorly scanned. No doubt amongst all of these documents are the gold nuggets the lawyers needed.
In fact, we frequently work on these types of matters with short timelines and piles of documents. However, this time the work arrived late on a Friday and was due by Tuesday morning at the latest.
Where to start and how to make sure the lawyers receive the translations on time?
This is the CHIN process:
- Compile a list of all documents – we start off with a numbering system including the lawyer’s file names
- Identify any duplicates or problems with any of the files (eg illegible scan, pages missing)
- Prepare a quotation
- Assemble the translation team: translators, reviewers and project manager/s
- Aggregate similar documents into batches for several translators
- Prepare instructions for the team including deadline, layout, file numbering, translator notes and NAATI translation certification process
- Deal with questions as they arise
- Ensure consistency in terminology, names, etc across all the translations
- Finalise translated and checked documents one by one, certify and send to lawyer in batches
- Be available to answer lawyer questions if any.
In large cases, there are usually additional documents to translate, meetings with legal teams requiring NAATI interpreters, and affidavits and witness statements to prepare and translate. Lawyers tell us it is advantageous to use the same team who build up expertise and familiarity with the case, the parties and the terminology. Luckily at CHIN we have both interpreters and translators who work together on these cases – sometimes over a long period of time.
Work is handled confidentially and only by qualified, certified translation experts.
Lawyers have plenty of other headaches to solve, the last thing they should worry about is whether the translations will be ready on time and whether they will be of good quality.
Our client told us that our work greatly helped in their legal defence.
