What Happens If You Submit an Incorrect Certified Translation?

The results of providing incorrect certified translations depend on specific circumstances. A certified translation requires precision verification from an authorized translator. A certified translation includes verification through a statement or certificate that confirms its accuracy. Documents in legal and medical fields, along with technical documents, require certified translations since minor inaccuracies can lead to major consequences. What happens when an incorrectly translated document survives certification?

Financial and Reputational Damage for Translation Providers

For professional translation agencies and freelancers, an inaccurate certified translation service can seriously damage their business. Trust is paramount in the translation industry. If clients receive a certified document that still contains mistakes, they may lose faith in the provider’s quality control process.

The financial implications can be severe:

• First, the client may demand a refund or partial discount.
• Second, reputation damage could lead to loss of future business and referrals.

A single error in an otherwise excellent translation can be enough to cause a client to look elsewhere next time.

Many translators choose to take out errors and omissions insurance to protect themselves from the costs of retranslation and damages stemming from flawed certified documents. Still, this does not shield them from potential reputation loss, especially if problems become a pattern rather than one-time oversights.

Legal Problems for Official Documents

Where certified translations are required for high-stakes official processes like immigration, litigation, or financial transactions, inaccuracies can yield dire legal complications.

The application for citizenship could be denied or result in documentation validity questions when translators make errors in birth or marriage certificate translation. Wrong translations of contracts and medical records, together with patents and evidence, create serious issues for court cases as well as business deals because they alter critical information.

While plaintiffs may be able to appeal if they can demonstrate that poor translation played a substantive role, it adds further delays, costs, and uncertainties. Courts can also levy fines or other penalties against translators or translation agencies that sign off on and affix their seal to erroneous certified documents, especially if fraud or negligence is suspected.

Health and Safety Risks with Medical Errors

Mistakes in medical translations can literally have life-or-death consequences if key information gets lost or miscommunicated. Areas like research, public health messaging, informed consent for clinical trials, intake forms, prescriptions, instructions for taking medications, surgery preparation, allergy documentation, and lab results depend heavily on accurate translation.

If a wrong or poorly translated medical document leads to patient harm, malpractice lawsuits or licensing discipline against the providers involved may result, along with possible civil or criminal charges against culpable translators or agencies. At a minimum, investigation and remediation costs will accrue. Any translator errors may also need to be disclosed to patients if they directly enabled subsequent problems.

Public health communications with errors cause people to misunderstand information, which leads to both non-compliance and higher infection rates, along with undesired health effects. Government authorities allocate substantial resources for health message translation but expect the information to remain dependable despite translators not being legally accountable.

Product Safety Implications for Manufacturers

When it comes to consumer products, instruction manuals, warning labels, and supporting technical materials commonly get translated for international sale and distribution. If safety-related translations contain material mistakes, manufacturers face major liability risks, especially when accidents or injuries arise. Plaintiffs’ attorneys will scrutinize flawed translations to establish grounds for legal action and substantial monetary damages.

Even without harm occurring, faulty translations that necessitate product recalls or disclaimers can saddle manufacturers with sizeable costs and tarnish brands. Knowingly selling merchandise with incorrect foreign-language instructions or warnings further exposes companies to fines for regulatory noncompliance in many countries.

Manufacturers who work with specialized translation services still need to take full responsibility for any translation errors. Safety translation defects remain the responsibility of manufacturers even though using certified translators alongside redundancy checks in approval protocols helps reduce potential risks. Manufacturers need to select translation partners carefully while they perform quality checks.

Business Disruption Across Sectors

For corporations in global business environments that depend on translation for vital texts like research reports, pitches, websites, marketing materials, catalogs, correspondence, technical documentation, and client presentations, errors can breed severe financial disruption.

Whether it is a cultural blunder that offends business partners or misleading numbers that derail high-stakes deals, the monetary and opportunity costs of getting translations wrong are substantial when international transactions are on the line. Frequent mistakes may lead decision-makers to cut ties with specific translation vendors or bring capabilities in-house. Leadership changes may even occur in some instances to restore credibility.

Immigration/Visa Delays and Denials

When applying for visas or permanent residency abroad, certification is frequently expected for official personal documents like birth certificates, marriage licenses, divorce decrees, police certificates, university transcripts, and bank statements. This helps confirm validity and factual accuracy to immigration authorities.

Small errors in certified documents will trigger warnings that delay immigration applications or result in their complete rejection. Officials often verify applicant materials and background information, which leads to prolonged secondary reviews when they doubt authenticity or truthfulness.

An appeals process exists for applicants, yet it extends over many months or years, during which external translators must evaluate mistakes made during initial certified translations. A number of mistakes exist in immigration applications, including omitted maiden names, incorrectly translated dates, and names that are misspelled, along with place of residence conflicts. It is possible for these technical problems to cause major harm to visa and residency application processes.

Academic and Professional Credential Issues

Educational and occupational credentials like diplomas, accreditations, licenses, and certificates often need certified translations to stand up for overseas use. This is true across disciplines like medicine, law, business, academia, engineering, and architecture.

However, small imprecisions or omitted nuances in degree titles, specializations, licensing terminology, institutional names, completion dates, or class rankings can have outsized impacts on how credentialing bodies evaluate candidates’ qualifications abroad. Certain terms directly correlate with competency levels, practice authority, or salary grades.

The consequences may include the denial of academic acceptance letters, the rescinding of employment offers, failure to obtain local practice permissions, or reduced hire rates. While explanations can be offered, the process proves excessively burdensome compared to presenting accurate certified translations from the outset. Retranslating and recertifying documentation also introduces delays during time-sensitive application windows.

Audit and Regulatory Scrutiny for Businesses

For corporations operating internationally in locations like Europe, Asia, and Latin America, regulatory mandates typically require that financial statements, tax documentation, payroll, compliance reporting, and other records be available locally in each relevant language.

While companies can outsource certified translations to meet linguistic needs, any substantive errors made have implications beyond embarrassment. In particular, inaccuracies can prompt tax authorities and financial regulators to open demanding audits and investigations, skeptical that previous filings painted a full and precise picture.

Proving the validity of financial reporting hinges on the reliability of underlying translations. Any material mistakes flagged through audit processes necessitate amended re-filings after corrected translation. Fines and injunctions may apply, too, if misreporting appears intentional rather than a translation-based accident. And, of course, the last thing businesses want is extended scrutiny from agencies like the IRS, SEC, or EU Commission.

Conclusion: What Recourse Exists?

When certified translations go awry, those affected have valid grounds to seek resolutions such as retranslation, refunds, or even damage compensation from translators and translation companies, depending on their specific liabilities. Maintaining detailed records helps document the due diligence undertaken.

Of course, the first step is alerting the translation provider to allow for remediation, correction and improvements going forward. If reasonable efforts at reconciliation fail and harm occurs, legal remedies exist in most countries to pursue further action. Small claims tribunals often handle simpler cases. For complex matters, hiring lawyers and initiating civil lawsuits become necessary.

Class action litigation also sometimes gets filed when many recipients use the same inaccurate certified translations, such as defective multilingual product manuals or misleading securities disclosures. The aggregated damages, tipped by shared outrage, then justify the legal costs of joint litigation.