Acrolex Giveaway

Post a link to Spanish Legal Translation on one or more sites (a forum, website or blog) and send it/them to me for verification. The first person to do so receives a license to Acrolex. Acrolex is a user-friendly program with over 70,000 acronyms and their meanings. The application will even let you add your own acronyms to its database. Rest assured, it is a legitimate copy. This is a blog on legal matters, after all!

All others will receive my own personal Spanish-English English-Spanish law glossary. Hand-picked terms. Groomed over the course of many years with terms that come up in dictionaries and in the actual documents you are assigned to translate. A tab-delimited text file ready to import into any terminology database. An invaluable addition to your legal terminology collection!

Keeping your PDFs online

In a previous post, I mentioned the advantages of using Foxit Reader instead of Adobe Reader. Since then, I have gotten into the habit of uploading them to Google Docs. Why? You might ask. For the simple reason that it takes up less RAM which means you can use your computer to run more programs. The other reason for doing so is to set up fewer windows, as having your PDF document in an open tab in Internet Explorer or Firefox means that that file is located in your browser and thus you do not have to alt+Tab through different programs to get to it.

As an added bonus, you have an online backup copy of your PDFs in the event of damage or accidental erasure of the ones on your hard drive.

Mexican All Caps Revisited

If you, like me, have decided to honor the MEXICAN LEGAL TRADITION OF WRITING DOCUMENTS WITH ALL-CAPS, AND WITH PLENTY OF BOLDFACE, you should know that Microsoft Word, at least in my case, ignores the spelling of words in all caps when a spell check is run. This means that if you are not a perfect typist (or speller), you could unwittingly let unsightly and offending all caps-gaffes reach your clients' computer screens.

Even if you have opted not to follow the Mexican legal all caps tradition, there are always company names and people's names in all caps whose typos could go unnoticed.

Not that you as skilled legal translators would do such a thing. Nevertheless, I am warning you on the off chance that this could happen.

Mexican Migration: South to North

Lately, I have come across quite a few birth certificates from northern Mexican States such as Baja California Sur and Sinaloa where the parents are originally from Southern states such as Oaxaca and Veracruz. There is a space for the parents' home state and the year they arrived in their new state on these birth certificates. I am still curious as to what use this migratory information is to government officials, but it has nevertheless given me a reason to do some research.

The reason that these birth certificates have reached my computer screen in the first place is that one and/or several of the parties listed on them has emigrated to the United States. Like Mexicans from other parts of Mexico, Oaxacans are looking for better opportunities -whether in northern Mexican states or in the United States. I found an interesting website on the Oaxacan migration here. As it so happens, many of these Oaxacan migrants are Zapotec, a Mexican indigenous group.

A thought on translating official documents

I regularly read Corinne McKay's blog, Thoughts on Translation to gain new insight on how to conduct business in the translation world. In a follow-up to a post on translating official documents, Corinne corrected her earlier stance on including images from the original source document (stamps, seals, signatures, photographs). Her new advice is taken from Thomas West, a renowned attorney and author of Spanish-English Dictionary of Law and Business""I know of an instance where an American judge asked that translators stop scanning in the seals and logos on official documents (birth certificates, marriage certificates) because it could appear as though they were “counterfeit” – in the judge’s view, it should be clear that the translation is a translation and NOT an original document, and the more fancy logos/scans you add, the more it can appear that the English-language document was issued by the officials in the foreign country. My conclusion is that all this fancy scanning is (1) not necessary and (2) dangerous, because it can make the document look forged and (3) therefore should not be done.""

I can't uphold this advice 100% because some agencies send templates of birth certificates with these official seals and stamps pasted into them. I have been congratulated for adding stamps, seals and signatures to my official document translations, and the end clients for these projects have been no less than district attorneys for US states bordering Mexico.

On the other hand, I have another client who was bothered by all of the extra logos and such. He said "keep it simple."

In conclusion, instead of prescribing a general rule for this practice, I would ask the client first whether adding these images is desirable. "It never hurts to ask." as the saying goes.