suggestions on automating a legal translation business

[Ivan]

I was wondering whether some of you might have some ideas on how to automate, or at least come close to automating, a legal translation business (spanish to english and english to spanish). I realize that a service business like this isn't the best to do this with, but shaving some weekly hours off of my involvement with the business is always a good thing. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[kamakiri]

Are you in the legal business already? If not then don't bother. That is a fast way to get sued.

If you are, then you should know about boilerplates. They have been around for literally hundreds of years, and are just standard contracts with blanks to fill in. Any and every law firm has a file of these documents.

[Peter Bowen]

I was re-reading the 4HWW last night and was struck by the point that some businesses and some jobs are not suitable for this kind of a lifestyle and should be dumped.

Systemize the translation business as much as possible which will give you much more free time but realize that the effort required to achieve complete automation will probably be worth less than the results.

Perhaps another business would be more suitable as a muse.

[TimW]

As a native English speaker who speaks, reads and writes Spanish, I can say that I've yet to come across a translation program that works for anything but the most basic of translations. I will admit, though, that I've not used more than a couple online translation websites.

The problem is that even though it comes "close", there is still a lot of things that it translates oddly. Additionally, there are quite a variety of regional variances that one needs to know. Thus, you still need to look over everything it's translated to ensure that it was done correctly. For me, that's nearly as much work as writing something to begin with.

Now, I don't do anything in the legal arena, where boilerplate may be a logical for legalese.