Translating a commercial contract is not the same as translating a criminal deed or a will. Legal translation is a delicate task: every term is crucial, every formulation could affect the legal validity of a document. Beyond this need for precision, each branch of law has its own particularities. What are the specific challenges of legal translation in different branches of law? And how does Lexa, our legal machine translation tool, help to answer this question effectively?
I. Business law: contractual complexity and liability issues
Business law translations are frequently required for documents such as articles of association, shareholders' agreements, commercial contracts, or documents relating to mergers and acquisitions. These documents are often long, technical and legally binding.
Every contractual provision must be translated with absolute precision. Any vagueness can lead to litigation. What's more, some concepts have no direct correspondence from one legal system to another.
What Lexa does: Lexa offers a selection of the "Business Law" domain before translation. Its engine is trained on thousands of contracts and commercial documents. It uses specific legal lexicons and produces a precise rendering, in line with the expectations of legal professionals.
II. Criminal law: translation to protect the rights of the defence
In the legal sphere, translation plays a crucial role in delicate situations: procedural documents, court verdicts, interrogation reports, European arrest warrants. Each term can have a direct impact on an individual's rights.
The stakes are both legal and human. Faithfulness to the original is essential. An error or an approximation can call into question the fairness of a procedure.
What Lexa does: Lexa guarantees strict data confidentiality. The engine uses a corpus of criminal judgments and pleadings to produce accurate translations in context. Terminological accuracy is further enhanced by adapted criminal law lexicons.
III. Employment law: a living, constantly evolving vocabulary
Labor law encompasses employment contracts, collective bargaining agreements, company agreements and disputes before the industrial tribunal (Conseil de prud'hommes). The jargon used is technical, yet strongly influenced by local and cultural customs.
The same term can vary from country to country (e.g. "CDI", "permanent contract"), and interpretation can be trapped by poor cultural transposition.
What Lexa does: Lexa allows you to select the "Employment law" domain and adapts the translation to the employment law terminology of the country concerned. It handles HR documents such as contracts, letters of dismissal and internal regulations.
IV. Notarial and family law: emotion, rigour and personal impact
Translation in the field of notarial and family law applies to wills, marriage contracts, adoptions, powers of attorney and donations. These documents have strong emotional value and considerable legal importance.
The difficulty often lies in the need to conform to the legal forms of the recipient country. A poor translation can render the document inadmissible.
What Lexa does: Lexa offers legal translations that comply with notarial and official standards. Documents retain their original layout, thanks to the integrated formatting tool. The translation can be proofread by a sworn translator via Legal 230.
V. Public and administrative law: a specific institutional language
Administrative law concerns documents such as ministerial orders, calls for tender, regulations and decrees. The style is frequently busy, technical and highly codified.
You need to know the vocabulary specific to local institutions and understand the legal framework to produce a relevant translation.
What Lexa does: Lexa uses institutional and regulatory corpuses to faithfully translate administrative texts. Lexa can also integrate its own lexicons to meet specific requirements (e.g. European directives, local standards).
VI. How Lexa meets these challenges every day
Lexa is much more than a simple machine translation tool. It is designed exclusively for legal professionals.
Here's how Lexa stands out:
- Specialization by field: choosing a legal field before translation
- Expert legal corpus: training the engine on millions of legal documents
- Customizable glossaries: add customer- or case-specific terminology
- Layout: faithful to the original document, whatever the target language
- Mass translation: simultaneous processing of multiple documents
- Human post-editing: possibility of proofreading by a legal translator
Each area of law has its own rules, vocabulary and challenges. Legal translation is never generic: it must be adapted to the specificities of each field.
That's what Lexa was designed for: to offer a specialized, secure, fast and accurate solution for lawyers, notaries, jurists and institutions.
📌 Do you work in the legal field? Test Lexa for free and see the difference.
