Tomedes Bridges the Legal Language Gap to Aid Community Housing

Tomedes recently provided an English-to-Samoan translation for a batch of real estate legal documents a client needed. The particular client is a community-focused organization, helping to resettle refugees and others who have faced intolerable hardship in their homelands into a new life in the US. 

In this case, the client was extending their support for Samoan-speaking individuals looking to apply for housing grants, which required the completion of various documents with legal terminologies. To ensure the individual understood the content of the documents he was due to sign, Tomedes’ client needed them translated from English to Samoan. This meant the client would be able to read the translated real estate documents in his native tongue and fully understand what he was committing to before signing the English version of them.

How Translation Addresses the Challenges of International Migration

There are countless reasons why individuals move from one country to another. Political and economic turbulence, depreciation of their environment and community - all (or a combination of these factors) may sway individuals or families to seek a new life overseas. While doing so can be an incredible opportunity for a fresh start, it proves to be extremely challenging for those who don't fluently speak the most prominent language of their new home country. For such parties, gaining access to housing, education, medical care, and employment can be difficult.

Tomedes’ client helps these parties better situate themselves by providing social, cultural, and educational support. The client also provides practical assistance such as support in finding suitable accommodation and contributions and grants to help them get established in their new home. For these reasons, our client is in constant need of accurate legal translation.

Why Tomedes?

The client chose to work with the Tomedes team for three main reasons: quality, price, and the breadth of our language offering. As the client regularly works with individuals arriving in the US from a range of different countries, it regularly needs different types of translation in different languages. 

Being a community-focused organization, budgets also need careful monitoring, hence the need for translation at an affordable price. The client was also keen to focus on the quality of the translation. This combination of price and quality is essential for non-profit sector translation services, with many socially focused businesses needing to watch the purse strings while also not compromising on quality. 

In this instance, the individual whom the client was helping was about to sign a binding legal agreement. As such, it was essential that he understood the terms of that agreement in full, meaning only a translation of the highest quality would suffice. This led to the client seeking a translation service with both ISO 17100:2015 (translation services) and ISO 9001:2015 (quality management systems) certifications. 

Supporting Local People with Local Translation

The client was also keen to work with a local service – one that had a connection to its area of operations. This meant that Tomedes’ San Diego translation service was ideally suited to the client’s needs. 

Community connections of this nature underpin much of the client’s success. While it deals with refugees and other vulnerable individuals moving to the US from around the globe, there is still a very local element to the cultural and social support that the client provides. It relies on connections with local partner organizations and host families to carry out its important work, despite the global context of that work. 

This local element is important to translation, as well. Translation services need to match the projects they undertake with the local language expertise of their translators. This helps with the translation of everything from idioms to symbols to correct time, date, and address formats, all of which can be subject to linguistic quirks that must be accounted for as part of the translation. 

Specific expertise in terms of the content being translated is also important. In this case, the client’s legal documents related to real estate. This meant they needed a translator with experience in that area – one who would effortlessly understand the real estate terminology as well as the legal language. This is a key part of ensuring translation quality. 

Using Translation to Deliver Success

The client used the English to Samoan legal translation to achieve a successful outcome. The individual it was helping signed the required documents and moved into their new home. Successful translation outcomes like this often lead to further work. In this case, the client is planning a multilingual survey to ensure it remains up to date with the needs, wants, motivations, and concerns of those it helps. 

How will you use translation to drive success in your business? Speak to Tomedes for ideas.