For legal & policy teams
Translate policy conservatively
Legal and policy translation is the opposite of creative. Preserve terms exactly. Don’t paraphrase. Flag uncertain clauses for human review. Output a deliverable that a lawyer can read, mark up, and sign off on.
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Legal translation is the opposite of marketing translation. Where a marketing translator wants the copy to land in the target market — adapt idioms, preserve persuasive intent — a legal translator wants the original meaning preserved exactly. Defined terms stay defined. Sentence structure carries forward. Uncertainty gets flagged for a human, not paraphrased. This workflow is built for that mode: a conservative styleguide, a legal glossary, uncertain-clause flagging, bilingual export for clause-by-clause review, and a handoff path to a sworn translator when one is required. The output is a translation a lawyer can read, mark up, and sign off on — not a draft that has to be re-translated from scratch.
How do you translate legal text conservatively?
Built for legal and policy content where literal accuracy beats fluent rephrasing, and where uncertain renderings need to be flagged, not guessed.
Upload the policy or legal document
DOCX, PDF, or Markdown. Clauses, numbered sections, defined terms, footnotes — all preserved.
Apply a legal glossary
Defined terms ("the Agreement", "the Effective Date"), regulatory references, party names — pinned to deterministic translations. No creative paraphrasing of legal definitions.
Use the conservative styleguide
The styleguide tells the AI: don’t paraphrase; preserve sentence structure; preserve sentence length; flag uncertain renderings rather than guessing.
Review flagged clauses
Uncertain renderings come back with a flag and the AI’s reasoning. You decide whether to accept, edit, or send to a human reviewer.
Send for human counter-review
Share via client review link with your legal counsel or in-house lawyer. Their comments come back into the workspace; resolve and export.
Export with bilingual reference
DOCX out with source and target side-by-side, so the reviewer can verify clause-by-clause without switching documents.
Why does legal translation need different rules?
Definitions stay defined
Defined terms get a single deterministic rendering across the entire document. No clause where "the Service" suddenly becomes "the Product".
Uncertain clauses flagged
Where the AI isn’t confident, it says so — instead of guessing. Human review focuses on the 5% that needs it, not the 95% that doesn’t.
Bilingual export
Side-by-side source + target is the legal industry default. Built in.
4× cheaper model, matched
Give a model the decisions behind past translations, not just their final wording, and it stops guessing. With enough of that grounding, a model costing a quarter as much matched a premium one on our own benchmarks.
The memory bet— Don’t take our word for it —
The editor, in miniature
A working slice of the real thing — Literess, glossary, styleguide, workflows, and the translation memory are all live. Click around.
Here to help you translate
A key turned in the lock and the door swung open.
У замку повернувся ключ, і двері розчахнулися.
The knock came just before midnight.
Стукіт пролунав перед самою північчю.
FAQ
- Transept produces a translation a lawyer can read and verify. It is not a substitute for legal counsel or sworn translation. For regulated filings, use it as the first-draft layer and have a qualified lawyer sign off.
- Sworn translation requires a certified translator’s signature. Transept doesn’t provide that. We do speed up the work the sworn translator does — they review and certify your finished output instead of starting from scratch.
- Default: optimize for natural reading. Conservative: optimize for structural and terminological fidelity. Default rewrites unclear sentences for readability; conservative preserves them and flags any ambiguity.
- Documents are private to your account. Not used for model training. Not shared across accounts. EU-hosted by default. See the security page for the full data story.
- Yes — Transept is translation software for legal documents: contracts, policies, terms, filings, and the like. As language translation software for legal documents it runs conservatively by default (preserve defined terms, preserve sentence structure, flag uncertainty instead of guessing) and exports a bilingual source-and-target file for clause-by-clause review. It produces a draft a lawyer can verify and sign off on — it is not a substitute for legal counsel or sworn certification.
- Sworn translation requires a certified translator’s signature; Transept doesn’t certify. What we do: produce a high-quality first draft that a sworn translator can review and certify, cutting their time from "translate from scratch" to "review and verify". Many sworn translators now use this hybrid workflow.
- Use Transept for the first-draft layer; have a qualified lawyer in the jurisdiction sign off on the final. For HIPAA-protected data, Transept is not currently a compliant processor — don’t submit PHI. For GDPR-relevant content (privacy policies, DPAs, regulatory filings in the EU), the standard process works fine.
- Conservative styleguide tells the AI: preserve sentence structure, preserve definitions, preserve sentence length where possible, flag uncertain renderings rather than guessing, don’t rewrite for fluency. The output reads more literal than a typical translation; that’s the point.
- Flagged sentences appear with a red marker in the editor and the AI’s reasoning for the flag. You decide: accept the AI’s rendering, edit by hand, or escalate to a human counsel. Smart Proofread re-flags any clause where the translation diverged from the source structure.
- Yes — bilingual export with parallel columns is the standard for legal review. The lawyer reads clause by clause without switching documents.
Keep reading around this workflow
- FeatureDocument translation that holds together→DOCX, PDF, Markdown — uploaded, parsed into blocks, translated with the rest of the document for context. Page 1 reads like page 300; the…
- FeatureA glossary the AI actually follows→Character names, product terms, branded phrases, client-specific vocabulary. Build a glossary once — manually, by upload, or seeded from a…
- FeatureA styleguide that steers every regeneration→Tone, register, rules, formatting conventions. Build a styleguide manually or have Transept generate one from a sample page of finished…
- FeatureSmart Proofread before you deliver→After twenty pages, the eye stops catching things. Smart Proofread re-reads the whole translated document against your glossary, your…
- Use caseTranslate the next client document→Per-client glossaries that travel across projects. Per-client styleguides that hold tone. Sentence-level review for the lines that matter.…