How to understand a contract in a language you don't read
A lease, an employment contract, a loan agreement or a set of terms, in a language you do not read, with someone waiting for a signature. It is a bad position and a very common one — for anyone who has moved country, and for anyone doing business across one. This page is the order of work: what to do first, what to check yourself, and where it stops being a translation problem and becomes a job for a professional.
Before anything else: do not sign yet
You are allowed to take the document away and read it. That is not rudeness and it is not suspicion — it is the normal thing to do, and anyone acting in good faith expects it. Pressure to sign on the spot is itself information. A landlord who will not let you take a lease home for an evening, an employer who wants a contract signed before you can read it, an agent who says the offer expires tonight: that behaviour is worth noticing separately from whatever the document says. Ask for a copy — the digital file if there is one, since a Word file or a text PDF translates far better than a photograph of a page. Then take an evening over it.
Get a translation you can read
A machine translation is the right tool here. You are trying to find out what the document says, not to file it anywhere, and it costs minutes rather than days. A few things make the result much better: Use the original digital file rather than a photo of it. A .docx or a text PDF gives clean paragraphs; a phone photograph of a page contains no text at all and has to be read by OCR, which introduces its own errors on exactly the kind of document where errors matter. Translate the whole thing, not the part you were pointed at. The clause that costs you money is rarely the one being explained to you. Keep the original open beside the translation. You will want to check numbers against it, and you can do that without speaking the language.
What to look for once you can read it
Work through the translation with a pen. Most contracts turn on a small number of things, and you can find them yourself. Money: every amount, what it is for, when it is due, and what happens if it is late. In a lease: rent, deposit, whose account the deposit sits in, what can be deducted from it. In an employment contract: salary, when it is paid, what is included and what is not. Time: the start date, the length, the notice period on both sides, and any automatic renewal. Automatic renewal with a long notice period is the single most common unpleasant surprise in any contract, anywhere. Obligations: anything phrased as must, shall, is required to, undertakes to. Read each one and ask what it would cost you to fail it. Getting out: how either side ends this, what it costs, and what happens to money already paid. What is missing: promises made in conversation that do not appear in the text. If the landlord said the white goods stay or the employer said the training is paid for, and the contract does not say so, it was not agreed. Then check the numbers against the original document, character by character. A translation can garble a figure, and a figure is the one thing you can verify with no language at all.
When to stop and get a person
A translation tells you what the document says. It does not tell you whether that is normal, whether it is enforceable, or whether local law overrides it — and in tenancy, employment and consumer law it very often does. A clause can be printed in a contract, translated perfectly, and still be worth nothing because the law does not allow it. Get a professional involved when the sums are large relative to your life, when the term is long, when something you read makes you uneasy, when the contract is with an employer in a country whose employment law you do not know, or when the other side is pushing hard. The efficient way to do it: translate the whole document yourself first, mark the three or four clauses that worry you, and take those to a lawyer, a union representative, a tenants' association or the relevant advice service. An hour spent on four specific clauses costs a fraction of an hour spent on forty pages, and you will get better answers because you will be asking better questions. Many countries also have free services for exactly this — tenants' unions, trade unions, consumer advice bodies, university student advisers, immigrant advice centres. They are used to this situation and they are used to translated documents.
Frequently asked questions
Is a machine-translated contract legally binding?
What binds you is the contract you signed, in its original language. A translation is a reading aid; it does not change the agreement and is not itself the agreement.
The contract is a photo I took with my phone. Is that a problem?
Yes. A photograph contains an image of words rather than words, so it has to be read with OCR first, which makes mistakes — on numbers especially. Ask for the digital file.
What should I check first in a translated contract?
Money, dates, notice periods and automatic renewal, then every obligation phrased as must or shall. Verify the figures against the original document.
Do I need a lawyer to read a lease?
Often not, once you can read it — but if the sums are large, the term is long, or something in it worries you, take the specific clauses to a lawyer or a tenants' association rather than signing on a machine translation alone.
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