This week, a U.S. law firm reached out again to translate the bios of their associates and the firm’s credentials into Chinese for a pitch to a domestic energy project. These types of documents may seem simple at first, but they often turn out to be more time-consuming than expected, and not always as rewarding.
There were two main challenges. First, when the transaction details aren’t clear, it’s easy to mix up who’s acquiring whom or who the target is. I had to spend a lot of time digging into the background of the deals they’d worked on because without that, literal translation could easily flip the parties. Second, for the numerous company names mentioned in the transactions, I had to log onto their official websites to check whether each one had an official Chinese name.