Part 3: A Few Words about StyleEnglish prefers SVO (subject-verb-object) constructions, which sometimes means reworking the order of the original French sentences significantly in order to achieve a natural-sounding flow in English. This is something that all language professionals know, of course, but it is all too easy to forget when you are bogged down [...]

Part 2: Terminological PitfallsThe second part of Tom West’s talk demonstrated how relying on dictionaries alone (even the leading specialized legal dictionaries on the market) can create problems during the translation process. One example he gave was the issue of reorganization/bankruptcy. Translators will be relieved to know that there is much confusion among the French [...]

I recently attended a talk top legal translator and founder of Intermark Language Services Tom West gave on French-English contract translation at the SFT Summer University for Financial Translation held in Paris in July. Tom addressed a number of misconceptions concerning the translation of contracts that are likely to be of interest to translation clients [...]