Motion Translation Services for US Courts

The Deadline Does Not Care That Your Exhibits Are in Korean

Motion practice runs on dates that nobody negotiates with. A response falls due on a fixed day, a reply follows a fixed number of days after that, and a clerk who rejects a filing at 11:52 p.m. has effectively decided the motion. Translation sits inside that clock whether counsel planned for it or not, because the moment a foreign language document is attached to a brief, the court needs an English version certified by whoever produced it. Late is not a delay. Late is a stricken exhibit, a lost argument, or a hurried request for leave that the bench remembers.

Jurilingua built this desk for that pressure. Motion translation here means the whole moving package treated as one unit: the notice of motion, the memorandum of law, every supporting declaration, the exhibits that give the declarations their weight, and the proposed order the judge may sign. We schedule backward from the filing date, not forward from the day the files arrive, and we say at the outset which pieces land on which day so counsel can build the brief around real delivery times instead of hopeful ones.

Forty years of doing this for American litigators has taught the desk what actually breaks under deadline. It is rarely the brief. It is the exhibit set that grows by two hundred pages on a Thursday, the declaration that arrives unsigned, the WhatsApp thread nobody read closely enough to notice it switches languages halfway through. Our project leads have seen each of those often enough to plan around them, and litigation clients rate this desk 4.8 on a five point scale, a figure earned mostly by trouble they never had to hear about.

Every Piece of the Moving Papers, Not Just the Brief

A motion is a stack, and the stack has to hold together in one language. We translate the notice of motion that opens it, the memorandum of law that argues it, and the declarations or affidavits that supply the facts the argument stands on. Attached to those come the exhibits: contracts, emails, invoices, corporate minutes, government filings, chat logs, technical reports. We render the proposed order too, since the party who drafts the order the court signs enjoys an advantage worth protecting through translation. The initiating document sits with a different team, since a complaint is a different animal from a brief.

The motion type shapes the work. A motion to dismiss translation usually turns on a handful of foundational documents, an agreement, a corporate registration, a forum selection clause, translated with the exactness that a jurisdictional argument demands. A motion for summary judgment translation is the heavy one: hundreds of exhibits, deposition excerpts, a separate statement of undisputed facts where every citation must point at a translated page that actually says what the statement claims. Motions in limine need the disputed material rendered narrowly and neutrally. Discovery motions need the underlying correspondence readable enough for the judge to see who stonewalled whom.

Opposition and reply briefs come back through the same hands, which matters more than it sounds. The opposing side's translation of a key sentence will differ from yours, sometimes innocently, sometimes not. Having the same specialists who rendered the moving papers examine the other side's version means counsel gets a clear account of where the readings diverge and which one the source language supports, ready to be used in the reply or at oral argument.

The Certification Page Judges Actually Look For

Courts do not accept foreign language documents on their face. A Spanish contract attached raw to a summary judgment motion is, for evidentiary purposes, a blank page: the record must contain an English translation, and that translation must be vouched for by someone competent to make it. In federal practice the vehicle is a translator declaration executed under penalty of perjury, and in state courts the equivalent affidavit or certificate of accuracy does the same job. Every file that leaves this desk ships with that page attached, naming the translator, the languages, the documents covered and the standard applied.

Getting the certification right is where inexperienced vendors quietly fail. A certificate that describes the wrong exhibit numbers, omits the translator's qualifications, or is signed by a project manager rather than the linguist gives opposing counsel a free objection at exactly the wrong moment. Ours is prepared per exhibit set, tied to Bates ranges or exhibit letters as your filing requires, and formatted so it can be appended, notarized or filed as its own docket entry without redrafting. The admissibility framework we work inside is described in more depth on our page about certified translation standards.

Formatting carries the same evidentiary weight. Translated exhibits keep their pagination, their stamps, their handwritten margin notes described in place, their signature blocks positioned where the original had them. Where the source cannot be read, the English says exactly that at exactly that spot and nothing gets invented to fill the hole, since a word supplied from imagination hands the other side its cross-examination. When a court or an adversary compares the English against the source side by side, the layout should make that comparison easy. That habit has kept our work standing in filings before federal and state benches for four decades.

Built Around the Briefing Schedule, Not Around Our Convenience

Send us the schedule with the documents. Opposition due the 14th, reply due the 21st, hearing the 5th: those three dates determine everything about how we staff and sequence the work. A heavy exhibit set is divided among several linguists who all draw on the same term list, and one senior reviewer owns the finished stack so vocabulary never drifts between batches. Priority exhibits, the ones cited in the first ten pages of the brief, come back first so drafting can proceed while the remainder is still in production.

Volume is what usually frightens counsel, and it should not. A five hundred page exhibit set in one language pair is a planning problem, not an impossibility. We triage with your team, separate what must be translated in full from what needs a summary or a certified excerpt, and put the full treatment where the citations will land. Excerpt translation is legitimate and common, provided the certification states plainly what was translated and what was omitted, which ours does.

Every quote arrives inside half an hour of the files reaching us, and it carries a committed delivery date rather than a range. That date is a promise the desk plans against, and it accounts for the second reader who examines every file before release. Rush lanes exist for the motion that appeared out of nowhere on a Friday afternoon. What rush never does here is remove the review step, because a fast exhibit with a mistranslated date is worse than no exhibit at all. Our production process is laid out in full here.

Who Sends Us Motions

Litigation boutiques send single dispositive motions where one foreign contract decides the case. Large firms send us their cross-border dockets, sometimes an entire exhibit universe ahead of a summary judgment round, and route the work through the arrangements our firm-side service page describes: retainers, matter codes, conflicts-aware handling and consolidated billing. In-house legal departments come to us when outside counsel needs foreign material fast and the budget for it sits internally. Government contractors and compliance teams arrive with regulatory records that end up attached to motions they never expected to file.

The pattern across all of them is the same. Someone realizes on a Tuesday that a document central to the argument is not in English, and that the filing is nine days out. What they need is not merely translation. They need a vendor who understands what a separate statement is, why an exhibit letter must match, what happens if a declaration is not properly executed, and how to talk to a paralegal at 7 p.m. without requiring a tutorial in litigation procedure. That fluency comes from doing this since 1984 for the American bar.

Confidentiality is assumed rather than sold. Files move over encrypted transfer and sit in encrypted storage, access is limited to the specialists assigned to your matter, and we sign your NDA rather than asking you to sign ours. Privileged work product deserves that, and pre-filing motion papers are among the most sensitive documents a firm hands to an outside vendor.

One Vocabulary From the Moving Papers Through Oral Argument

A motion is never the end of a matter, and inconsistency across its stages is expensive. If the disputed clause is rendered one way in the moving brief, another way in the reply, and a third way in the expert declaration, opposing counsel will notice and the court may too. We hold a per-matter terminology base for every litigation client: party names, defined contractual terms, technical vocabulary, job titles, corporate entity forms, all fixed once and applied to everything that follows.

Practically, that means the reply brief you send us three weeks later reuses the exact wording of the exhibits already filed, arrives faster because the memory has seen most of it, and costs less for the same reason. It means an appellate brief drawing on the same record does not introduce a fourth version of the sentence everyone is fighting about. It means the interpreter at oral argument can be briefed from the same glossary, so the words the judge hears match the words in the binder.

Consistency of this kind is not a software feature. It comes from linguists who specialize in litigation, most of them with law degrees or years inside firms, working under a two-reader rule that no deadline suspends. Their credentials are open to inspection on the team page for our legal linguists, and the professional bodies we answer to are listed alongside them. Motions are not a place for generalists, and this desk has never staffed one.

Exhibit Languages That Reach This Desk Weekly

Foreign evidence follows trade and family alike: Spanish exhibits in almost every district, Chinese across supply chain and IP disputes, Korean and Japanese in manufacturing and licensing fights, Portuguese for Brazilian corporate records, German in cartel and warranty matters, Russian and Arabic in sanctions and asset work. Past 80 pairs are covered.

Filing Wherever Your Docket Sits

Motion work reaches us from the busiest courthouses in the country: New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, Newark and Seattle. Local rules differ; our certification adapts to each.