1 MILLION TRANSLATED LEGAL TERMS FROM 100 JURISDICTIONS WORLDWIDE

– building a global system for translating legal terminology

The world needs a global system for conveying legal concepts between languages and across jurisdictions

The world needs a global system
for conveying legal concepts
between languages and across jurisdictions

TransLegal is partnering with dozens of leading universities around the world to bring quality, certainty, transparency and accountability to both human and machine translation in the legal domain, by connecting the world’s legal languages in a single, human-curated, multilingual and multi-jurisdictional database.

Our projects

News

Harvard Law School lectures on the WLD

(17 April 2024) TransLegal CEO and founder, Michael Lindner, and TransLegal's Chief Legal Officer, Michael Krallmann, held two lectures in March at Harvard Law School on the World Law Dictionary.

Deal signed for South Korea project

(21 August 2024) TransLegal has entered into an agreement with the Kyung Hee University Center for East-Asian Legal Studies to develop a South Korean-specific legal terminology dataset comprising 9,000 legal terms translated from English into Korean and an additional 1,000 uniquely South Korean legal terms translated into English. Professor Kwang…

Successful meeting with SRM University in India

(26 August 2024) TransLegal Founder Michael Lindner and local TransLegal representative Ashwin Nair met with representatives from SRM University’s Faculty of Law, including Professor and Dean Dr Vijay Kumar Singh and Professor and Head of Law Dr Sandeep Kulshrestha, to discuss potential cooperation on development of a Hindi-English legal dictionary…

Ethiopia meetings on World Law Dictionary

(15 May 2024) CEO and founder, Michael Lindner, and Chairman, David Kellermann, met on April 15 with lawyers from the Ethiopian Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, the Ethiopian Lawyers Association, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, and a professor from the University of Addis Ababa to discuss inclusion of Ethiopian…

TransLegal to develop Italian legal dictionary

(16 February 2024) TransLegal has signed an agreement with the University of Turin and the specialist legal translation agency LawLinguists to partner on the development of an Italian-language legal dictionary specific to the jurisdiction of Italy.

Connecting the world’s legal languages to solve four challenges:

Quality

Certainty

Transparency

Accountability

The problems

The legal domain presents unique translations challenges – particularly regarding accuracy and precision – which AI and machine translations are unable to overcome.

All translation providers make their own competing and potentially conflicting choices when translating legal terms, thereby tying people (knowingly or unknowingly) to a particular translation.

A fractured translation industry and opaque AI training data leave people with no means of checking how different terminology choices were arrived at and why.

End users have no way to discover who has made a terminology decision, and no opportunity to review or challenge it.

The solution

Expert-curated datasets containing accurate translations of legal concepts from one language and jurisdiction into another.

A single, recognized and widely used terminology resource which gives certainty to parties in international transactions.

A comprehensive, thoroughly documented, readily accessible database showing the basis for decisions and choices made when communicating legal concepts internationally.

A system which grants insight into who has made translation decisions and choices, as well as a robust review mechanism.

What we’re doing

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A single database

We are connecting the world’s legal languages through English by creating bilingual dictionaries detailing and explaining legal concepts from numerous jurisdictions.

1 million legal terms

Our database covers a constantly expanding range of countries. We aim to launch projects for 100 countries by the end of 2024, producing 10,000 legal terms for each jurisdiction.

Expert language teams

We set up highly-qualified teams of academics, lawyer-linguists and legal practitioners to produce the world’s most sophisticated multi-jurisdictional legal terminology database.

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Extensive comparative law notes

Our language teams employ functional equivalency analysis to produce unique notes explaining differences between legal concepts in different jurisdictions.

Definitions and audio files

We provide definitions of legal terms in clear and easy-to-understand English, written at an intermediate level and designed especially for non-native English speakers. Our resources also include over 10,000 audio files explaining how to pronounce English legal terms.

A single, multilingual database for the world’s legal terminology

Any global database of standard translations of legal terminology to and from English must be based on the following:

✓ Expert language teams composed of lawyer-linguists, academics and practitioners
✓ A jurisdictional approach whereby dictionaries reflect not only language differences, but also differences between legal systems (e.g. not just Portuguese-English, but also Brazil-Canada)
✓ Comparative law analysis, including of common law vs. civil law issues
✓ Coordination of terminology across jurisdictions
✓ Comparative law notes explaining paired legal terms that are not functionally equivalent
✓ A robust, user-friendly, single-source platform, easily accessible by browser and app
✓ A system for feedback and questions
✓ Broad endorsement by universities, bar and lawyers’ associations, and governments
✓ Coverage of at least 100 countries
✓ Coverage of least 10,000 legal terms per jurisdiction

Multiple applications

TransLegal’s multilingual, multijurisdictional dataset has a range of potential applications, including:  – improving AI translation for the legal sector, – expanding the linguistic reach of legal tech software and developing AI-based comparative and analysis solutions for the legal sector.