yndigo

If it smells like legalese, it must be…

I’ve mentioned Wayne Schiess’ blog in the past because, although translators are often good writers (as I argued in an earlier post, writing is the translator’s most marketable skill), they gain a lot from writing tips from within their industry’s specialty. The point of Mr. Schiess’ blog, if you haven’t read it, is to encourage attorneys to write in plain English instead of making their writing “smell” legal by using fancy legalese.

Let me take this opportunity to point out Jennifer Alvey’s new blog, Word Solutions, which also picks up this idea from Wayne Scheiss. Having graduated from Duke Law School, and with 15 years experience in law and publishing, I expect we’ll be reading some more language tips from Jennifer. She has a good tip that could apply to translators too: keep your legal reading vocabulary and legal writing vocabulary separate, so one does not contaminate the other.

I have been guilty of using legalese when a plainer term was available. It’s so easy to do as a translator when you read a lot of it. Young attorneys perpetuate legalese, and translators perpetuate translatorese. Often we translators don’t feel it’s our responsibility to replace these old words, especially when they seem to be fine equivalents of old words in another language. And it’s not our place, really. We don’t make the news, we just translate it.

Not only that, but we translators are forced to be more cautious than the attorney who drafted the document in the first place. For example, instead of using “hereinabove,” Wayne suggests “specify what you are referring to and where it can be found.” The translator doesn’t have that luxury and has to stay as vague as the source. And when he tells us to just do away with terms like “witnesseth,” the translator would prefer to stay safe and represent all the antique terms, and tone, of the original.

At the same time, the reason we have to keep up with language developments like the plain-language trend in legal writing is because we develop habits, some of them bad. As translators, we build these automatic lists of equivalent terms in our brains, terms we haven’t had to look up in years. And it helps us go faster and remain consistent. But the industry we’re translating for evolves and we have to make sure we update our brain’s auto-list as necessary.