Translations by lawyers for lawyers

Eulenhaupt Translation Services is a a lawyer-linguists’ cooperation, providing legal and financial translation services, not only but mainly for lawyers, notaries, tax consultants and accountants.

The way we work

As a network of lawyers and translators, Eulenhaupt Translation Services operates on the principle of dual control through interdisciplinary collaboration. Consequently, in order to ensure a second opinion in the true sense of the word, every translation made by a lawyer is reviewed by a graduate linguist. And vice versa, every translation carried out by a professional translator is checked by a graduate lawyer.

Centre of interest

Our translators’ focus is on translating voluminous complex legal documents. As bilingual and bicultural lawyers we see the substantive and procedural differences in Common law and Continental law systems.

Assessment

As indicated before, law is subject to the culture of a country and may vary substantially and essentially. Legal translation is therefore considered one of the most challenging specialties. Not only does any high quality legal translation demand idiomatic, orthographic, semantic and grammatical correctness but also correctness of the contents in a broader sense. There is a necessity for linguistic skills as well as legal skills to fulfil both demands. In the words of the American lawyer Francisco Avalos it reads as follows: "Legal translating requires two basic skills. The first skill is a fundamental knowledge of the original and target languages. The second skill is an intelligent grasp of the legal system of each of the countries involved. The state of these two conditions, in the legal translator, will determine the quality of a legal translation. A good legal translator has the ability to not only retain the integrity of the legal information of a document, but to capture nuance inherent in a language, while also respecting the author's writing style."
The Croatian lawyer and lecturer in legal translation Susan Sarcevic adds: “Making reliable decisions (as a legal translator) requires not only legal competence but also considerable intuition. In legal translation intuition is not a natural ability but is acquired through interdisciplinary training in law and translation.”

History

In 1995 Eulenhaupt Translation Services was established as a legal translation agency by lawyer-linguist Michael Eulenhaupt. Michael began translating legal documents when he was student at Amsterdam Law School. As a German native speaker living in Holland for many years, it seemed the obvious thing to do. In February 1995, after graduating with a masters degree in Dutch law from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, Michael became engaged in professional legal and financial translation.

Media/computer hardware

When doing business best possible i.e. timely communication is more important than ever. Use of the smartphone, netbook and desktop computer ensure optimal internal and external communication; i.e. communication within the translators´ network and between you as the customer and us as the supplier.

Computer software/Internet

Every single translator of the network is very experienced in dealing with computer software and the Internet. Consider automatic speech recognition, translation programs on the Internet (Goolge Translate) and computer-aided translation which can substantially simplify the processing and management of texts that are (largely) identical, not only in terminology but also in structure. Computer aided translation software memorizes words and syntax. This is especially useful not only with repetitive text but also with information that needs frequent updating. However, with legal translations, experience has shown that such tools are not much help. Which does not mean, on the other hand, that they are useless.

Confidentiality

It goes without saying: all assignments will be treated with the utmost confidentiality. Without any doubt, confidentiality - along with quality and punctuality - is the most important factor in Eulenhaupt Translation Services' relationship to its clients.

Network

The Amsterdam branch of Eulenhaupt Translation Services is a main supplier of Dutch-German legal translation whereas the Berlin branch provides state of the art German-English legal and financial translations. Since there is a high standard of personal understanding within each member of the network Eulenhaupt Translation Services can respond very quickly and flexibly to translation requests. In other words, due to the special nature of our lawyer-linguists' network we are in a position to provide you with high quality legal translations within the shortest turnaround times.