In 2012 I wrote here about how Juliette Scott, a translator who blogs at Words to Deeds, is doing PhD research on the legal profession’s experience with translation, in particular of corporate and court-related documents.
Well, her research is still ongoing, so if you commission translations of contracts, I encourage you to go here and complete her survey.
By the way, I’ve always thought that translating traditional contract language is a tear-your-hair-out kind of task.
One of the long-term goals of the Common Draft project is to have standardized “Lego blocks” of text that can be translated once and for all (at least for everyday usage) into multiple languages, with standard article- and section numbering. That’d be like the chapter-and-verse numbering of the Bible — no matter what language you choose to read it in, you know that the same chapter and verse are supposed to mean the same thing . (Of course, it’s also reminiscent of the old saw about the denizens of a bar who had told each other the same jokes so often that they’d numbered them ….)