Contracts, discovery, foreign judgments, and patent filings, translated by legal-experienced linguists in 326 languages.
Prism Linguistics provides legal translation services for US law firms, corporate legal departments, and courts: contracts, discovery documents, foreign judgments, patent filings, and arbitration materials in 326 languages. Every job goes to a legal-experienced translator and is reviewed by a second linguist, with certified translations available for court filings. Fixed quotes come back within 60 minutes during business hours.
Last reviewed August 24, 2026 by the Prism Linguistics editorial team
Legal translation is its own discipline because legal documents do things. A contract creates obligations, a judgment binds the parties, an exhibit carries evidentiary weight. When wording has legal effect, the translation has to reproduce that effect, not just the vocabulary. That is the work this page describes.
One scope note before the detail. This page covers written work. If you need a court interpreter for a deposition, hearing, or client conference, that side of the practice lives with our legal interpreting services. For a document-by-document look at certificates, powers of attorney, and police records, see legal document translation. And for business paperwork with no legal consequences attached, our document translation services page is the better read. Legal work sits inside our wider translation services.
A translator can be excellent and still be wrong for a merger agreement. The linguists we assign to legal work are native speakers of the target language, professionally qualified and background-checked, and they have law backgrounds: legal translation training, formal legal education, or years of work with firms, courts, and in-house teams. We match that background to the matter, so a patent claim and an asylum declaration never land with the same person just because the language pair happens to fit.
If you are comparing providers, ask who will actually do the work. The American Translators Association (ATA) certifies translators in specific language pairs, and NAJIT publishes standards for judiciary translation; a provider should be able to tell you, without hesitation, what qualifies their translator for your document. We hold formal certification where the setting requires it, and we put the answer in writing on request.
In a typical week the inbox holds a Spanish distribution agreement heading to a counterparty in Mexico City, a set of Korean emails produced in discovery, a German judgment that needs to be readable in a New York court, and a will written in Portuguese. Spanish is the pair we see most, and our Spanish translation services carry much of the contract and evidence work; the full range covers 326 languages.
| Document type | Typical matters | Typical turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| Contracts and commercial agreements | Cross-border deals, employment, licensing, review before signature | 2 to 4 business days |
| Discovery and evidence | Emails, chat threads, produced documents in litigation | Scoped per set, deadline first |
| Foreign judgments and court orders | Enforcement, recognition, family matters | 2 to 3 business days |
| Patents and IP filings | Prior art, specifications, office actions | 3 to 5 business days |
| Arbitration materials | Submissions, exhibits, awards | Scoped per bundle |
| Corporate formation documents | Articles, bylaws, registrations for foreign entities | 2 to 3 business days |
| Wills and estates | Probate with foreign-language wills and records | 2 to 3 business days |
Discovery rarely arrives tidy. Expect scans, screenshots, and the odd voicemail; recorded material goes through audio transcription first, then translation, so the transcript and its English version line up. Bates numbers and exhibit references stay intact throughout, and we will help you triage a large set so you only pay for full translation where the content justifies it.
The hard part of legal translation is not the language; it is that legal concepts are system-bound. Terms like "consideration" and "estoppel" are precise doctrines in American common law with no direct equivalent in most civil-law systems, so a word-for-word swap produces a clause that reads fluently and means something slightly different. That is the worst kind of error, because nobody spots it until it matters — usually in front of a judge.
Working in the other direction raises the mirror problem: a French "procès-verbal" is not a verbal process, and a Spanish "magistrado" is not a magistrate. Our translators render system-specific terms with the receiving system's own vocabulary, flag concepts that genuinely do not map, and keep defined terms consistent from the first page to the last. If "the Supplier" is rendered one way in clause 2, it reads the same way in clause 40. Small details carry the risk: party names spelled consistently, dates unambiguous, figures checked digit by digit.
When a foreign-language document goes before a US court, attorneys expect the translation to come with a signed certification identifying who translated it and what qualifies them to do so. The Federal Rules of Evidence set the tone here: Rule 604 treats an interpreter as an expert who must be qualified and sworn to make a true translation, and judges bring the same expectation to translated exhibits. An uncertified translation invites an objection your opponent does not have to work hard to make.
Every certified translation we deliver is complete and word-for-word, with stamps, seals, and illegible passages flagged rather than silently dropped, and a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy attached. The layout mirrors the original so the bench can put source and translation side by side. What certification means in the US, and where else it is required, is covered on our certified translation page.
Almost everything on this page is confidential by nature, and a fair amount of it is privileged. We sign non-disclosure agreements as standard, yours or ours, before any documents change hands. Files are shared only with the linguists working on your matter, transferred and stored securely, and never used to train anything. Material marked attorney-client privileged or attorney work product is treated accordingly, and we are used to protective-order terms in litigation work. None of this needs arranging specially; it is simply how legal work runs here.
Legal jobs run through a TEP process: translation by a legal-experienced linguist, editing by a second linguist who compares the translation against the source line by line, then a final proofread of the formatted document. The second review is not an upsell; it is standard on legal work, because terminology errors survive a single pass more often than anyone likes to admit. Nothing leaves on one pair of eyes.
Already have a translation and just want it checked? That happens more often than you would think, usually when a filing inherited a translation of uncertain origin. Our proofreading service reviews existing translations against the source and tells you honestly what needs fixing, if anything.
Four steps, built around your filing deadline. Most instructions start and finish by email.
Upload files through our quote form or email them to info@prismlinguistics.com. Tell us the language pair, the receiving court or agency, and the filing deadline or hearing date.
We reply within 60 minutes during business hours with a fixed price and a delivery date. If a deadline is tight, we say up front what is realistic before you commit.
A legal-experienced translator produces the translation, and a second linguist reviews it against the source. Certified translations arrive with a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy.
You receive the finished files by email, formatted to mirror the originals. Hard copies go out by USPS or FedEx when the receiving court wants paper.
Legal translation is priced per source word. As a guide, US market rates for legal work typically run from about $0.14 to $0.25 per word for common language pairs, with rare languages and heavily formatted or handwritten material sitting higher. Short standard documents that need certification start at around $24.95 per page. Rush deadlines add a premium, subject to capacity, and we confirm the surcharge before you commit rather than after.
Treat those figures as market guidance, not a price list; the language pair, the state of the scans, and the deadline all move the number. What drives translation pricing generally is set out on our pricing page, and a fixed quote for your own documents is free and comes back within 60 minutes during business hours.
The questions attorneys and paralegals ask most often before instructing us.
A project manager who handles legal work daily will reply with a fixed price and a delivery date within 60 minutes during business hours.
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