Legal Translations

Legal Translations is an AI translation service built specifically for legal paperwork — contracts, certificates, patents and court or government documents — run by the translation agency Tomedes. You upload a document, the tool translates it while trying to keep the original layout intact, and you can then pay for a human legal linguist to review the result or produce a certified version. It sits between a free machine translator and a traditional translation agency, which is the point: fast and cheap for understanding a document, with a route to human sign-off when the document has to stand up legally.

What you can actually do with it

The service is narrow by design. It does one job, in two gears: machine-fast, or human-checked.

• Translate legal documents in place. Upload PDFs, Word files or scans and get back a translation that preserves formatting such as tables, clause numbering and layout, rather than a wall of plain text.
• Get a consensus machine translation. Its headline feature compares output from a large number of AI translation models and picks the version the majority agree on, which reduces the odds of one model’s odd rendering slipping through.
• Preview before paying. A portion of the translation is shown free so you can judge quality and layout before committing to the full document.
• Add human review. Optional review by legal specialists, and certified translations on request, for filings and other uses where a machine draft is not acceptable.
• Cover unusual language pairs. The underlying platform supports a very wide range of languages, well beyond the common European pairs.
• Handle sensitive material more carefully. The service is pitched at law firms and in-house teams and leans on confidentiality, which is the main argument against pasting a client contract into a consumer translation site.

Who it fits best

It fits small law firms, in-house legal and compliance people, and business owners who receive foreign-language contracts, supplier agreements, corporate filings or personal certificates and need to know what they say quickly. It is also useful as a triage step in larger workflows: translate everything cheaply, then send only the documents that matter to a human translator.

It is a poor fit if you need general-purpose translation for marketing copy, websites or support content — a broader translation platform will serve you better. It is also the wrong starting point if every document you handle needs to be sworn or certified anyway, in which case you are buying an agency service and should compare agencies directly.

Things worth knowing before you commit

• AI output is a draft, not evidence. Machine translation of legal text can be fluent and still wrong on a defined term or a negation. Anything you will file, sign or rely on should be human-reviewed.
• Certification is a separate service. Certified, sworn and notarised translations are requested on top of the AI output, with their own turnaround and cost, and requirements differ by country and court.
• Confirm confidentiality in writing. If you are handling privileged or personal data, ask directly about data retention, whether content is used for model training, and where processing happens, and get an NDA or data processing agreement if you need one.
• Free preview, paid full document. The free tier shows you a sample; expect to pay for the complete translation and again for human work, so treat published free claims with care.
• It is a young service. The site launched relatively recently, though the parent translation agency has a much longer history, so most of the track record you can check belongs to Tomedes rather than this tool.

Alternatives to compare it against

For quick comprehension of a document, general machine translation tools such as DeepL or Google Translate are free and adequate, but weaker on layout and unsuitable for confidential material. For anything binding, traditional certified translation agencies such as RushTranslate or Gengo, or a local sworn translator in the relevant jurisdiction, give you accountability and a certificate that courts and registries recognise. Legal Translations is worth using when you want machine speed on legal formatting first and the option to escalate to a human without changing supplier.

Free allowances, per-document charges and the cost of human review or certification change over time. Check the vendor’s own pricing page and confirm a quote before you commit.

Further reading

• ‘5 Must-Have Legal Tools for Streamlining Your Company’s Legal Processes’ — shows where a translation step fits among the other tools handling company paperwork.
• Ultimate Guide to Contract Compliance — relevant because a mistranslated defined term or negation is exactly what breaks contract compliance.
• Legal Business Software Essentials — the wider software stack a small firm buying this service is likely to already run.
• Ultimate Guide to Legal Tech Integration — useful if you want machine translation to be a triage step inside an existing document workflow.

Have you used Legal Translations?

One sentence is enough. Would you pick it again, and why or why not? We publish the critical reviews too — that is the point.