Case Studies

The Challenge

Insurance regulatory filings are among the most demanding documents in financial translation. They combine the technical vocabulary of international accounting standards with the specific regulatory terminology of the target jurisdiction’s supervisory framework. A consolidated balance sheet prepared under IFRS contains line items, classification headings, and disclosure notes whose Spanish equivalents must reflect not only the language but the accounting conventions recognised by the Bolivian regulator. A term rendered in the generic Spanish of a dictionary rather than in the specific financial Spanish of Latin American regulatory practice risks a query from the APS — or, worse, a delay in the approval process.

The apostille requirement added a procedural dimension. Each translated document needed to pass through a formal legalisation chain — certified translation, notarisation, and apostille — within a timeline dictated by the regulatory submission deadline. Any error in the certification or legalisation process would require the entire chain to be repeated, jeopardising the filing date.

Our Approach

Jurilingua assigned the project to a senior financial translator holding qualifications in both accounting and Spanish legal translation, with direct experience of Latin American insurance regulatory filings. The translator worked from a terminological reference base built from prior Allianz projects and from the APS’s own published regulatory glossary, ensuring that every accounting term, line item heading, and disclosure note was rendered in the precise terminology expected by the Bolivian supervisor.

The translation was reviewed by a second qualified linguist with financial specialisation, who verified terminological consistency across the full document set — ensuring that the same English term was rendered identically in every document, and that cross-references between the annual statements, the consolidated accounts, and the supporting schedules remained internally coherent.

Upon completion of the linguistic review, the project manager coordinated the certification and legalisation process. Each translated document was certified with a signed Statement of Truth, then notarised by a notary public and submitted for apostille under the Hague Convention. The legalisation chain was managed to a pre-agreed schedule, with each step tracked and confirmed to the client in real time.

Expertise: Insurance translation services

The Result

The Challenge

The challenge is compounded when translating into languages with very different syntactic structures and levels of formality. Arabic reads right to left and employs formal registers that can distance the reader from the practical content of a document. Urdu shares this script directionality and carries its own conventions around medical and legal terminology. Polish, while left to right, uses a case-inflected grammar that can produce dense constructions when translating from English legal phrasing. In each language, the translator must produce a document that is legally complete and linguistically natural — a combination that requires judgement, not just fluency.

Our Approach

Jurilingua assigned each language to a translator with dual expertise in medical and legal translation, and with specific experience of patient-facing documentation. The translators were briefed on the purpose of the forms, the profile of the intended readership, and the requirement to maintain legal equivalence while using language accessible to non-specialist readers.

Each translator worked from the approved English master, following a controlled translation process: the full form was translated, then reviewed by a second qualified linguist who assessed both legal accuracy and readability. The review focused in particular on the sections describing risks, data processing, and the participant’s right to withdraw — the clauses where misunderstanding carries the most serious consequences.

For the Arabic and Urdu versions, the project team verified that the right-to-left layout, script rendering, and typographic conventions were correctly implemented in the final formatted documents — ensuring that the translated forms could be printed and distributed without further adjustment by the client. The Polish version was reviewed for naturalness of expression, with particular attention to avoiding the overly formal register that literal translation from English legal language can produce in Polish.

The Results

The three translated consent forms were delivered to King’s College London within the agreed timeline and were approved for use in the clinical research programme without revision. The forms enabled the research team to recruit participants from Polish, Arabic-speaking, and Urdu-speaking communities in London with confidence that informed consent was genuinely informed — not merely formally documented. King’s College London has since instructed Jurilingua on further multilingual projects supporting its research and administrative operations.