Legal translation is a serious business. And rightly so. Just one tiny mistake could be disastrous.

So disastrous, in fact, that a mistranslation can result in a criminal trial completely collapsing. It’s not as rare as you might think – there has been a recent rise in the UK of interpreter errors causing huge problems in the courts. Mistranslations can often be funny – so funny in fact that there are entire websites devoted to them. But in other cases, particularly when involving medical or legal translation, mistakes can have serious consequences. We’ve gathered together a few examples where small errors caused huge problems.

Medical Mishaps

An unconscious 18-year-old man, Willie Ramirez, was taken to a Florida hospital in the 1980s. His friends and family spoke only Spanish, and tried to explain what was wrong with him to hospital staff. A hospital translator interpreted ‘intoxicado’ as intoxicated, meaning drunk or drugged. In this case, ‘intoxicado’ means poisoned. Subsequently the patient was treated for a drug overdose, and suffered a huge brain haemorrhage.  This sadly left him completely paralysed. The hospital had to pay out a whopping $71m in compensation.

Democratic Dissent

A few years ago, a number of translation errors plagued one election campaign in Arizona, USA. The worst of these was printing an incorrect date for the election on material intended for Spanish-speaking voters. As more errors were revealed, local activist groups accused the state of corruption, prompting a full investigation into the blunder. No foul play was discovered, but a lot of trust was lost in the democratic process.

Economic Collapse

In 2005, a Chinese news reporter found herself unexpectedly covering finance news. Despite having little financial knowledge, she wanted to impress and wrote a piece speculating on the forecast for the Chinese Yen. Pretty harmless, so far. The piece was subsequently translated and interpreted in a far more aggressive tone, prompting many investors to sell, sell, sell. As a result the US dollar briefly plummeted before the error was discovered.

Prescription Woes

In multicultural New York, USA, prescription labels are required to be translated into Spanish, many using machine translation. A recent study in a leading medical journal found there were translation errors in half of all labels printed. As well as many spelling and grammatical errors, some of the mistranslations even involved dosage amounts and instructions on how to take medicines. The journal described the consistent errors as ‘potentially hazardous’ if the mistranslations were interpreted incorrectly.

Political Sensitivity

Thailand and Laos have had a historically strained relationship, but this was made worse thanks to a number of translation issues by Thai-owned Channel 7 in early 2014. Mistranslations from Thai to Laos of simple phrases such as ‘train’ and ‘tissue paper’ caused outcry from Lao people, causing a huge social media storm, and bad feeling between both countries. It was so serious that the channel sent out managers to meet the Lao ambassador in Thailand to apologise personally. At Reflective Source Translations, we understand how important it is to get it right. All of our legal translation experts hold at least one (and sometimes even more) professional qualification in the specific field of law your translation falls under. This solid foundation ensures your translator not only understands the legal concepts and processes, but has the knowledge to understand even the trickiest of legal terminology and jargon. The result is a high quality legal translation that you can rely on to be accurate, in or out of court. If you want to speak to us about legal translation, don’t hesitate to contact us today.