Certified translation support for international legal matters

As part of her work in the probate field, Carmen is often involved in legal affairs involving English and Spanish jurisdictions. As a result, a considerable volume of legal documents frequently needs to be translated in order to meet the legal and administrative requirements. These include wills, certificates, medical reports, other probate documents, etc. Moreover, the translations often need to be certified in order to be submissible in the relevant procedures. In identifying a partner to assist in fulfilling these needs, Carmen considered a number of potential language service providers before finally settling on Albion Languages for its combination of experience, flexibility and quality credentials.

One of the main areas of Carmen’s work is handling probate matters relating to the wills of UK citizens residing in Spain. Spanish probate differs significantly from that of the UK, with an executor not normally appointed in Spanish practice, for example. Instead, beneficiaries need to appear before a practising Spanish notary to accept the inheritance although this is normally done by executing a power of attorney. As the beneficiaries of the UK citizen’s will are located in the UK but the will needs to be processed under Spanish probate, key documents such as the will, certificates and so on all have to be translated into Spanish and certified. These certified documents all need to be submitted in hard copy within short turnaround times. At the same time, as the lawyer guiding the process, Carmen also needs to have access to the same documents and information. Extraordinary conditions such as the Covid-19 pandemic further increase the logistical challenges.

Based on the outline of the required expertise and samples of typical documents, we created a project team specifically for Carmen’s projects. This consisted of specialist Spanish legal sworn translators and proofreaders, a dedicated project manager and an account manager. Due to the many parties involved, it was very important to establish a very clear schedule and distribution of responsibilities. Coordination was also required with an international courier service for the delivery of hard copies.

By customising our offering specifically to the client’s needs, we could seamlessly integrate our service into the client’s own probate services. In this way, the demanding deadlines and multiple deliveries could all be completed in full and the client could focus entirely on the legal matter in hand and their own client. At the same time, the required top quality of translation was ensured through tried and tested workflows and optimised communication with our very supportive client.

Find out more about Albion Languages’ legal translation and financial services translation experience and how we could support you in your continued business success.