The Translation Ticket: Boosting Your Career Chances in the  Legal Industry

The global legal market is expected to reach almost $789 billion in 2022. That makes it one of the biggest industries in the world.

It’s not surprising that it is attracting so many young people. A growing industry means it can be a good place to build careers. If you are considering joining the legal industry, you are on the right track to having a bright future.

But you need to enhance your skills if you want to be competitive. One of the things that can enhance your career is to learn how to do legal translation. Translating legal documents is very much in demand and will stay that way.

The Legal Industry Today

But because the legal industry is growing and is quite lucrative, the competition there is quite stiff. The paralegal job market growth rate is over 12% higher than the national average. While that might indicate that there are plenty of opportunities, there is also the threat of outsourcing. Industries are outsourcing more and more jobs in order to save money. The legal industry is no different.

Some of the jobs that have been done in-house are now being outsourced. But as long as you upgrade your skillsets, this shouldn’t alarm you.

Career Prospects in the Legal Industry

The legal industry is as good as any other industry when it comes to building a career.

Jobs in the legal industry include lawyers, paralegals, and other support roles. The lawyers are pretty much secure in their jobs. It is the paralegals and other members of the industry who are facing stiffer competition.

Practitioners in legal and administrative support will have to improve their skills to remain competitive in the industry. The industry itself is fast-changing and the practitioners in it must adapt.

Aside from communication skills and research skills, those who want to join the industry must learn new things.

Having Legal Translation Skills

One of the most effective ways to boost your value and stand out in the legal industry is by acquiring additional skills in high demand. These sought-after skills can elevate you to the status of a valuable asset within law firms and companies that require legal talent.

While expertise in information technology, design, or marketing can undeniably enhance your value to a law firm and potentially increase your compensation, a specific skill directly impacts your role within the legal domain – gaining language skills like a translator.

Legal translation services play a pivotal role in handling a diverse range of legal documents, such as contracts, affidavits, and sworn statements, that are integral to various legal processes. The importance of legal translation lies in its ability to ensure accurate and precise communication, making it a specialized field not accessible to all translators. To excel in this demanding domain, a profound understanding of multiple languages and familiarity with the intricacies of legal systems and terminologies are prerequisites.

If you have fluency in widely spoken languages and a firm grasp of legal principles, venturing into legal translation can be highly rewarding. Beyond enriching your career prospects within the legal industry, it opens up avenues as you can gain a more diverse clientele and provide multilingual legal consultations that most of your peers in the law firm wouldn’t the people. By collaborating with reputable legal translation companies, you can access a steady stream of tasks and projects that leverage your linguistic and legal expertise.

How to Get Started in Becoming a Multilingual Legal Professional

So if you agree that becoming a multilingual legal professional is a great addition and enhancement to your career in the legal industry. But how can you become one?

There are three things that you can do to prepare for becoming a legal professional with multilingual skills:

• Mastering languages
• Studying different legal systems
• Reading and understanding legal documents

We need to take a deeper look at each of these steps.

Language Mastery

Ideally, you should be fluent in the languages you will be working on as a multilingual legal professional. Besides having a mastery of the English language, you will need to be fluent in another language and have a nuanced understanding of the culture, as it will be crucial when you translate or talk with clients that come from a different country.

Learning a new language takes years of study though some say it can be done just by studying a language for one hour each day. But more than mastery of the languages is required. You need to be familiar with the legal language of different countries. Legal language is very different from the everyday language used by people.

Studying Different Legal Systems

As mentioned, translating legal documents requires more than fluency in the languages involved. You also need to have a working knowledge of the concerned legal systems. As a multilingual legal professional, you will need to be well-versed in the international legal system and understand how the court systems and laws outside of the one you are practicings, especially if your client comes from another country. By doing this, you are gaining a substantially important skill that any law firm or company handles with an international clientele. By familiarizing yourself with other legal systems, you can be aware of the context of the legal document and can translate or give solid advice to a client on how to go through with legal matters.

Reading and Understanding Legal Documents

Another crucial means of familiarizing yourself with what’s needed for translating legal documents is reading multilingual legal documents. It is the best way that you can become familiar with the kind of legal language and the formatting of each is to read as many of them as possible.

Practice

If you are serious about becoming a multilingual legal professional, then you should spend time practicing, and you can start by doing simple translations. As you get the right feel for the task, you can move on to translating legal documents.

The legal industry has become very competitive. It is up to you to give yourself every advantage that you can. Becoming a legal expert with the capabilities to translate legal documents is one way to make yourself attractive to recruiters. It’s also one way for you to start another career, another line of work that you can fall back on.