SMG Legal

With deep-rooted commitment to the Ministry’s needs, we organised an ad hoc team to dedicate to the numerous translation requests that we received for over 44 languages, ensuring a productive output of 2,500 words per day, amounting to a total of 110,000 words per day across all languages. The particularly critical historical moment in question and the high degree of multiculturalism that characterises French society also required our specialist assistance in rare languages, such as Georgian, Tigrinya and Tamil.

Syntactic and lexical accuracy and adherence to delivery deadlines have proved to be the two most important requirements for these translation services, and our experience has enabled us to meet them time and time again, to the client’s full satisfaction.

The types of texts we translated include judgements, court documents, various kinds of legal documents and informative user guides about the French justice system.

By virtue of its many years of experience in the legal sector and the economy of scale generated by its other existing contracts with the Spanish Ministry of Justice and the Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office for the same translation services, SMG Legal was able to optimise its own service charges and thus create savings of 24% for the French client.

This series of linguistic services crowns our commitments to the French legal sector, attesting to the market’s appreciation of our skills and spurring us on to continue SMG Legal’s adventure in a nation as serious and meritocratic as France.

Among our main law firms clients are British firms such as Hogan Lovells, Norton Rose Fulbright and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, as well as illustrious names on the Italian scene such as Ughi e Nunziante, De Berti, Jacchia, Franchini and Forlani and Alpeggiani. The service was also appreciated by the in-house counsels of leading multinational companies, such as Beretta and Citigroup.

SMG Legal met the judicial sector’s tight delivery schedules, producing an output that at times exceeded 150 pages per day thanks to the dedication of our valuable translators, who often even worked at night and on days off.

The quality of the translations was ensured by specialised legal translators, who add real value to our company. As an example of our commitment to terminological research in the legal field, we would like to highlight our official English translation of articles 2325-2510 of the Italian Civil Code concerning the regulation of joint-stock companies, which is featured in the “Italian Company Law” handbook by Piacentini and Mascagni.

Finally, our linguistic support includes sworn translation services, asseverations, legalisations and issuing of the Hague Apostille, which certify the validity of the translation for use both in the country where it is produced and abroad.

As part of our written translation services, we provided all the translation staff required for the translation of European custodial sentences. For three years, our translators worked in-house at the Ministry, translating into Spanish the numerous sentences that the European courts issue in English, German, French and Portuguese.

Furthermore, since 2017 we have been active alongside Spain in the linguistic management of migration emergencies, providing reception centres in Ceuta and Melilla with Arabic, French and Spanish translators and interpreters on a daily basis, as well as responding to the needs of these centres regarding other rare languages.

In addition to providing in-house translation services for the Ministry or its foreign offices, there have been many translations requested of our offices over the years, on an almost daily basis, in a wide variety of languages, including Arabic, Albanian, Dutch and Turkish. These translations have covered court documents, various texts for external communications and internal reports on legal and judicial matters.

Finally, we provided simultaneous interpreters and technical equipment to support the Ministry’s conferences and hearings, thanks to our many years of experience in the field of professional interpreting and the availability of our rental and installation services for technical equipment and conference systems.

In addition to legal translations into more than 60 languages, including English, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese, the contract with the Council included complex simultaneous, consecutive and whispered conference interpreting services.

We are so proud to have been awarded this contract, which was subsequently renewed for several years, as it is a highly sought-after role by language service agencies due to the importance of the client and the legal issues it deals with.
For example, in 2020 and 2021 we provided interpreters for international conferences on the violation of human rights in Turkey and on the reorganisation of the European judicial systems.