Are You Familiar With Juremy?
Back in 2018, when I was first awarded two framework contracts by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for the provision of legal translation services, a whole new world opened up for me.
Needless to say, I was over the moon. But I was also terrified because it meant walking on unfamiliar ground. I didn't allow that to stop me though. I started investing more and more in my researching skills, because translating for the Court truly implies doing a lot of research. It's not just about translating into another language. It also means being in contact with different legal systems, each one with very specific legal concepts that may not be common to all Member States. Typically, when translating documents relating to a case before the CJEU, in addition to EU law and CJEU case-law, a translator will often have to deal with the legislation of the Member State of the referring court. And sometimes the referring court will rely on other case-law as well, namely that of national courts or the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). There is a lot to navigate!
So as excited as I was (and still am... five years later), I realized very early on in my journey that it was a pretty difficult task, just as I had initially suspected, therefore I needed some help to keep up with the deadlines. Especially because two years later, I also started translating on a freelance basis for the European Commission and several European bodies and agencies. Soon after, I decided to specialize in translation for European institutions and it has become my main area of expertise ever since.
Usually, when I'm in the process of translating documents such as Opinions of Advocates Generals, Member States legislation, Directives, Regulations, Decisions, Communications and other documents concerning specific EU policies, such as Food and Agriculture, Energy, Mobility and Transport, Climate, Internal Market, Employment and Human Resources, Justice, Finance, Trade, Tax and Customs, Health and Food Safety, Foreign Policy, Migration and Home Affairs, and so on and so forth, I use EUR-Lex and IATE. It is a necessary and essential requirement for a reliable and accurate translation. Documents emanating from European institutions are very often intertwined. So, of course that means that you need to check and even double check EU terminology to ensure consistency. Having multiple translations for one single term it's not the ideal scenario because it can easily become confusing to the reader. Research is key and always the answer to every language-related problem. But deadlines don't always allow a translator to do extensive research. Unless they have a helper! That's what JUREMY has become for me since I started using it. It has allowed me to speed things up, because the amount of time I spend researching EU terminology is a lot shorter now, with no downsides as to the quality and consistency of the translation, which have actually improved since I have more time at hand now to focus on just that.
So what is Juremy? In a nutshell, it's a very user-friendly EU Terminology Search Tool. One thing I never liked about EUR-Lex is that you have to use " " to get a perfect match, which can be very time-consuming because you still get too many results anyway and, depending on the term you are searching for, most don't even apply to the context of your translation, even when doing an advanced search by filtering results based on language, type of document, or what have you. And we know that translation is all about context!
Yes, EUR-Lex is your online getaway to EU Law, but it's close to impossible to actually be able to find exactly what you are looking for in the first 60 seconds. Well, with Juremy you can. This is because Juremy allows you to do a concordance search in the official EU corpus without quotation marks and actually shows you snippets of paragraphs where that specific term was used to see if it applies to your context, without having to open the document first. So you get perfect matches and fuzzy matches all in the same search which you can filter by relevance or by date. Along with EUR-Lex results, it also shows you IATE results. On top of that, it provides a direct link to all the EUR-Lex and IATE entries in bilingual format. And as if it weren't already enough, it also has a plugin for Trados that enables users to access Juremy within that CAT tool. Ah, but wait, there is more! A memoQ plugin is now on the way, soon to be released!
For me, Juremy is such a time saver! It spares me so many hours of work per day because the amount of time I used to spend on each terminology lookup has now been reduced to a few seconds. Absolutely game-changing. I couldn't recommend this more, especially to legal translators and lawyers. Having said that, I must make a disclaimer: This is not sponsored, just genuine recommendation. I purchased my own subscription. But since I am 100% satisfied with Juremy, I reached out to them to see if they could provide me with a discount code for my fellow lawyer-linguists and legal translators in general who might be interested in using this search tool as well. They were extremely nice to do so, therefore here it is: A1LTJEU
Enjoy your 14-day free trial first just to see for yourself how good Juremy is, especially if you are still on the fence, but save this post to come back to it when buying a freelance subscription (because I know you will want one!). I can vouch for the reliability and effectiveness of this tool considering that I use it on a daily basis. So, don't forget to click here and use the 10% discount code if you decide to trust me on this one. You won't regret your purchase, I can assure you. In fact, I am so sure of it that I know you will thank me later :)
TN done at Lisbon
April 22nd, 2024
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