Ker-lunk!

The vagaries of the sworn translation

Some say it’s beeidigt, but, in Germany, it’s vereidigt; for some it’s certified and for some it’s sworn; in French it can be assermentée, or it can be jurée (in fact it’s the translator who’s the former, the translation that’s the latter); and they’re all imbued with a certain mysticism: sworn translations.

No matter what inroads have been made on the translation industry by AI (and they’re not few), the sworn translation industry remains one unfettered by the vagaries of computerisation. Not.

A sworn translation is a translation done by a sworn translator, who is a creature of somewhat indistinct status. Not an officer of the court and not a member of the bench or of the bar, they have no distinct place in a courtroom, yet are increasingly needed there, especially if they speak certain esoteric languages hitherto virtually unknown on these shores. To brandish the title sworn translator or sworn interpreter in Belgium, you need to show you can master two languages (obviously; or more, less obviously) and prove you know your bum from your elbow when it comes to Belgian law.

For this latter requirement, you need either to be an Emeritus professor of law from an erudite university or otherwise prove your ability to navigate the jargon-rich alleyways of the legal system, to wit by having given up practice for a couple of months and devoting yourself to a special qualifying college course costing around two thousand euros. In return for your investment, you have absolutely no guarantee of being awarded any work by the Justice department and such work as you are favoured with will pay you around half what the market rate is for similar work elsewhere (like a trade conference or someone’s birth certificate). The state makes the highest demands of ability and then pays the lowest of rates. What a surprise.

From 2021 to 2022, sworn translations were legalised by the translators themselves. This is arrant nonsense, because legalisation is a process by which any doubt as to the status of him or her who translates is banished by the fact of the authority that appointed the translator in the first place certifying that they are who they say they are. Except that it wasn’t nonsense as far as the state itself was concerned.

Previously an official in the Justice department who needed a translation would look up the Justice department’s official list of sworn translators, call the requisite individual up and ask, “Are you free, Mr Inman?” (assuming the callee’s name was Inman). If Mr Inman was free, he would reply, “I’m free,” and a state order would be issued telling him to do the translation, called a réquisitoire. Before Mr Inman’s translation was official however, it needed to be legalised: he had to get the body that had appointed him as a sworn translator to certify that the translation they’d received from him after calling him up because his name is on the official list was in fact from the person they had called up based on their own list, which is a little bit circular in logic but water-tight. If unnecessary. And in 2021, the Justice department, after 191 years, tumbled to that fact. So, they, at no small expense, issued all sworn translators (and interpreter-translators) with a fine-looking, specially minted rubber stamp that made a satisfying ker-lunk noise when depressing the imprint of the swearingness on the document being sworn. Ker-lunk, is how it went. Ker-lunk. Nice sound.

A year after being issued, these stamping machines ceased going ker-lunk, because they declared their expiry date to be 30 November 2022. And on 1 December 2022, all sworn translators started using electronic signatures. Which made as much sense as the rubber stamps had with their ker-lunking. You see, what an electronic signature does is attest to the fact that the person signing the document is the person signing the document. But what an electronic signature does not, unfortunately, do is certify that whoever is signing the document is a sworn translator. It does if you manipulate the text of the signature to say that you’re a sworn translator, but all it does is link the signature to the person who holds a given ID card, not what status as a sworn translator the holder of that ID card is. No matter, just as with rubber stamps, one person knows exactly what status a person doing a ker-lunking exercise or signing with an electronic signature is, and that’s the Justice department. But not really anyone else.

Except that a lot of people who ask for sworn translations are not the Justice department, but a private individual. This is all supposedly catered for by the offices to which sworn translations are submitted by private individuals knowing via Justice that the translator is bona fide. But that assurance is not offered to the private client until he actually submits his document. And sometimes he will submit his document abroad. Technically, he needs to apply for an apostille to do that – they cost 20 euros and are easier to get than when ker-lunking was all the rage. But an apostille is not always required, and so the credibility gap is wide in a lot of cases where a sworn translation is submitted abroad without the need for an apostille.

I said that, on 1 December 2022, all sworn translators started using electronic signatures. Well, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I found it hard to get a functioning electronic signature and, after over six months of trying, I wrote to the helpdesk and they said, write to your local authority. The local authority said there was nothing wrong with the system. But there was, as one might guess: I wanted an electronic signature on a Mac computer, and finally the government admitted it was a problem, because I had a new-style ID card. New-style ID cards and electronic signatures will not cooperate with each other. So I need to send all my translations either to a long-suffering Serbian colleague, who has signed my sworn translations for nearly nine months and whose patience I don’t want to unnecessarily stretch, or to the Justice department, who then add a paper legalisation and send the document to my client. Some clients like rubber stamps, and this is super for them, because they get rubber stamps in abundance. Some insist on electronic signatures, however, and then I lose the custom. Because I follow the rules, which have for nine months ignored the fact that it is impossible for me to use an electronic signature, I lose business.

If I can prove to Justice that I tried to extradite General Pinochet and prosecute the murderers of Belgian UN troops in Rwanda at the start of the genocide there (I did both, and more) – using evidence that I threw out some time ago because these matters pre-date the current date by more than ten years – they will let me remain as a sworn translator. But, as things stand, my four law degrees don’t impress them much. Because they’re not Belgian. They’re from Scotland and Germany, which are civil law countries, but never mind. It all makes pressing for an electronic signature that works a bit of a waste of time. But, at least, it’s justice. Rough, but justice.

I swear it.