Nowadays, a key aspect that serves to regulate business relationships consists of the business agreements and service contracts that are established between a company and all their collaborators, including other companies, private parties and public organisms. In order to achieve growth that is ethical, fair and profitable for all parties involved, these parties must agree on a number of clauses and protect them legally by means of a legal document. In this way, the parties will be aware of what is expected from them at all times, including the manner in which they must behave, whom they must address under certain circumstances and, last but not least, the risks they are exposed to in the event they fail to fulfill any of those clauses. This is the reason behind the aforementioned cooperation agreements, which can adopt different names depending on the context in which they are framed. Then, when a conflictive situation arises, the parties will be able to consult said contract clauses so that, in the event of detecting non-compliance, they can take unilateral action or use a judicial instrument. Such is the reality of the contemporaneous market, where every company starting their journey in today’s business world will search for the best legal counseling, in addition to a risk analysis assessment and a take on the feasibility of fulfilling the terms and conditions set by said agreements.
Even with all this covered, conflicts can arise at any time and under all types of circumstances. There’s one case that is certain to bring about the most red tape: when the conflict takes place between companies established in different countries or, more specifically, countries that speak different languages. Usually, for the relationship between these two hypothetical companies to develop correctly, there must be a vehicular language for their mutual communication. In fact, the agreements are always written in a source language that must be translated into the languages that are required for the rest of the parties to understand their content, although the version holding the legal power will always be the final version. This begs the question: is it a must to translate the documents generated as a result of court proceedings or is it only an option? Is the plaintiff responsible for bearing the costs of translating said documentation? Is there a legal framework regulating these issues? Is any type of translation considered valid? This article will provide the answer to these questions.
As we mentioned earlier on, there may be the case where a company decides to file a lawsuit against a party that is located in a country where a different language is spoken. Indeed, we may wonder whether the lawsuit should be filed in a second language. In fact, the lawsuit must be filed in the language of the organism where it is going to be processed, so that if the lawsuit is going to get filed in Spain, it should be written in Spanish, and this document shall be considered as the source document. By all means, given the circumstance that the counterparty speaks a different language, it is imperative to provide a translated version of the lawsuit so that this party can gain access to all the information and understand what it is being sued for, what are the the plaintiff’s claims and the deadlines for legal action. These matters are included in article 265, 1. 1st paragraph of the Law on Civil Procedure. Undoubtedly, the text of the law does not only apply to the lawsuit in question, but also to all the documents that will be provided during the court proceedings, with special emphasis on the so-called “evidential documents”, including purchase orders, invoices, contracts, etc.
In the event that these documents are written in a foreign language and must be filed before an Spanish-speaking party based in Spain, the documents must be translated into Spanish or into the official language of the Autonomous Community where the lawsuit is filed, as explained in article 144 of the Law on Civil Procedure mentioned above. However, isn’t this obvious? Interestingly enough, a regulatory legal framework has been drafted because, until recent times, there were plenty of cases in which one of the parties in a civil and commercial proceeding would provide documents written in a different language as proof, which seriously hindered understanding and the subsequent assessment of the court organisms.
The key point of the law is that it dictates that documents written in a foreign language and untranslated will lack any evidential weight, therefore they will hold no validity throughout the proceedings. Every company that is party to a legal proceeding must be aware of this piece of information to be able to provide the relevant documentation. And now, who’s responsible for paying the translations costs?
We may wonder whether it is us who needs to pay for the translation of a lawsuit that is lodged against a recipient that speaks a different language. For starters, the law says we must, and reserves the possibility of subsequently reviewing the responsibility for said expenses. More recently, a ruling by the Court of Justice, within the context of a case of application for free justice, dictated that said free justice must also include the expenses incurred due to the required language services for the proceedings. This information should also be considered especially relevant, since according to the law, the defendant party residing overseas could reject the notice document when it is not written in the defendant’s own language. As we can see, court proceedings involving parties who reside overseas and speak a different language require linguistic services to be able to correctly initiate the judicial mechanism.
Due to all the foregoing, a company which values their international trading ties shall have a language service provider that specializes in the legal area, mainly because all legal organisms can disregard those documents the translation of which seems inaccurate, defective, ambiguous or unreliable. A translation agency which counts on legal translation experts is the perfect ally for the business strategy of any company looking to expand internationally. At Montero Language Services, we have a directory of professional translators who are experts in this field, who are connoisseurs of the typical terminology used in court proceedings and who imprint a seal of top quality on every project in which they are involved.
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