Translation Services
Contracts, witness statements, evidence bundles and court orders, translated by legal-experienced native speakers for UK law firms since 2013.
Prism Linguistics provides legal translation services for UK law firms, courts and in-house teams: contracts, witness statements, court orders, evidence bundles and immigration documents in 300+ languages. Every job goes to a legal-experienced native-speaker translator and is reviewed by a second linguist, with certified translation accepted by HMCTS, the Home Office and UKVI.
A quick word on scope before anything else. Everything below is about documents: paper, scans, bundles, the things that get translated and filed. If it's a person you need, an interpreter standing up in a hearing or sitting in on a client conference, that side of the work is on our legal sector page. The two often travel together in the same matter, and plenty of firms use us for both.
Translating legal material is its own discipline because legal documents do things. A contract creates obligations. A witness statement carries a statement of truth. A court order binds the parties. When wording has legal effect, the translation has to reproduce that effect, not just swap the vocabulary, and that is the work this page describes. For individual documents and what needs certifying, see our legal document translation page.
In a typical week the instructions include a disclosure bundle from an immigration practice, a shareholder agreement heading to a counterparty in Warsaw, tribunal witness statements, and a foreign judgment that needs to be readable in an English court. It comes from solicitors, in-house counsel and litigants, and it has been part of our workload since 2013.
Legal translation sits within our wider translation services. For business paperwork with no legal consequences attached, reports, brochures, HR material, our document translation page is the better read.
Contract translation covers supply and distribution agreements, shareholder agreements, employment contracts, terms and conditions, powers of attorney and NDAs. Both directions: English contracts going out to overseas counterparties, and foreign-language contracts coming in for review before signature, or after things have gone wrong.
The difficulty is that legal concepts are system-bound, not just language-bound. "Consideration" in English contract law has no tidy equivalent in most civil-law systems. A translator who doesn't know that will produce a clause that reads fluently and means something slightly different, which is the worst kind of error because nobody spots it until it matters. So contract work goes to translators who know both legal systems, not just both languages.
Defined terms stay consistent from the first page to the last. If "the Supplier" is rendered one way in clause 2, it is rendered the same way in clause 40.
For litigation we translate pleadings, witness statements, exhibits, expert reports, foreign judgments and court orders. Much of it arrives as a bundle rather than a tidy single document: a stack of scans, some manuscript notes, a few screenshots of messages, and a filing deadline that was set before anyone realised translation would be needed.
Bundles get handled as bundles. Pagination and exhibit references stay intact, the layout of each original is mirrored so the bench can put source and translation side by side, and stamps, seals or illegible passages are flagged in the translation rather than silently dropped. A judge reading an exhibit wants to know that what they cannot see, we could not see either.
The same care applies to smaller jobs. An employment tribunal case can turn on a run of WhatsApp messages, and a Romanian document translation of an informal exchange needs the register kept intact: slang stays slang, a threat stays a threat.
Immigration work is a large share of our legal translation. Asylum evidence, foreign police reports, identity documents, medical letters and family records, translated for Home Office and UKVI submissions and for appeals before the First-tier Tribunal. This material reaches us week in, week out from immigration practices, Duncan Lewis Solicitors among them.
These cases often turn on languages most agencies cannot cover: Tigrinya, Kinyarwanda and dozens of others where the UK pool of qualified translators is small. Our 300+ languages include them. Family proceedings raise the same need in more familiar pairs, where a certified Polish translation for court of a birth or marriage certificate is a routine instruction.
When evidence in a foreign language goes before a UK court or the Home Office, it needs a certified translation: the translation plus a signed statement confirming the work is complete and accurate. Ours are accepted by HM Courts & Tribunals Service, the Home Office, UKVI, HM Passport Office and UK universities. You get a PDF, and a stamped hard copy by tracked Royal Mail where the receiving body wants paper.
Not every document in a matter needs certifying, and we will say so when it doesn't, because certification costs more. If a document is going abroad and a sworn or notarised translation is asked for, we prepare the certified translation in the form a notary public needs; the notary step itself is covered on our notarised translation page. What "certified" actually means in the UK is on our certified translation page.
A legal translator needs three things: native command of the target language, genuine fluency in the source, and enough legal experience to recognise what a document is for. We draw on more than 20,000 vetted linguists and match the translator's background to the material, so a commercial contract and an asylum statement do not land with the same person just because the language pair matches.
Every translation is then reviewed by a second linguist against the source before it leaves us. Two pairs of eyes, on every legal job, as standard.
Most bad legal translation fails on terminology rather than grammar. False friends are everywhere in legal language; "magistrado" is not a magistrate, and "procès-verbal" is not a verbal process. Procedural terms need the receiving system's own vocabulary, so an English claim form is called what an English court calls it. And the small details carry the risk: party names spelt consistently, dates unambiguous, figures checked digit by digit. The second-linguist review exists for exactly this.
No account, no minimum spend. Most instructions start and finish by email.
Upload scans or files through the online quote form, or email the bundle over. Tell us the language, the deadline and which court or body will receive the translation.
We reply within one working hour during office hours with a fixed price and turnaround. Legal work is priced per source word (short standard certificates per page), and the quote is the price you pay.
A legal-experienced native-speaker translator does the work and a second linguist reviews it against the source. Certified translations arrive with a signed statement of accuracy, with hard copies posted by tracked Royal Mail where needed.
Legal translation is priced per source word. As a guide, legal, medical and certified work runs between £0.12 and £0.18 per word in the UK, against £0.09 to £0.14 for standard business content. Rare languages and specialist technical material sit higher, from £0.15 to £0.22 or more, and same-day deadlines add a premium, subject to capacity. Short standard certificates are priced per page, typically £35 to £60 with the certification statement included.
We accept Legal Aid Agency funded matters at the published LAA schedule, and NHS framework rates where the instruction comes through a trust. The full ranges, and what moves a price up or down, are set out honestly on our pricing page. For your own documents, skip the guesswork: a fixed quote is free and comes back within one working hour during office hours.
Almost everything on this page is confidential by nature, and a fair amount of it is privileged. Files are handled in line with UK GDPR and shared only with the linguists working on your matter. We will sign a non-disclosure agreement before anything is sent across, or work to your firm's own confidentiality terms if you prefer. Court and immigration material has been our daily bread since 2013, so none of this needs arranging specially; it is simply how the office in Warrington runs.
If the job is spoken rather than written, court-cleared interpreters are on our legal sector page, alongside the rest of what we do for law firms.
Send the documents, tell us the deadline and the receiving court or body, and a project manager will reply within one working hour during office hours.