When a "Faithful" Translation Misleads: What One Legal Term Reveals About the Risks in Your Translated Documents

Introduction

A legal translation can look accurate and still fail its reader. Every word may correspond to the original, and a quick comparison with the source text may raise no concerns. Yet the reader of the translation may come away with an unclear or even mistaken understanding of what the document actually says.

For businesses, law firms, and organizations that rely on English–Indonesian legal translations, this is a serious risk. It is also hard to detect, because these errors do not look like errors. This article illustrates the problem with a real editing case involving a single legal term, penumbral right, and explains what it means for anyone who commissions, reviews, or relies on translated legal documents.

The Case: One Sentence, Two Translations

The source sentence reads:

Source text: The right to abortion is usually defined as a 'penumbral right'.

Two Indonesian translations of this sentence were produced:

Version 1: Hak atas aborsi biasanya didefinisikan sebagai 'hak penumbra'.

Version 2: Hak aborsi biasanya didefinisikan sebagai 'hak tersirat'.

Version 1 appears to be the more faithful choice because it keeps the original word penumbra. A reviewer without specialized knowledge of both law and language would probably approve it. As the following sections show, however, it is Version 2 that actually conveys the meaning of the original.

What the Original Term Means

The word penumbra comes from astronomy, where it describes the partial shadow cast during an eclipse. American constitutional law borrowed this image to describe rights that are not written in the Constitution but lie in the "shadow" of rights that are. According to US Legal Forms, the term refers to rights and powers that the U.S. Constitution does not state expressly but that can be inferred from its language.

Authoritative legal dictionaries confirm this meaning. Oran's Dictionary of the Law describes the penumbra doctrine as "the principle that specific constitutional rights have less clear, but still real, implied rights, such as the right to privacy" (Oran, 2008, p. 390). Black's Law Dictionary treats penumbral right as a synonym of implied right, defined as "a right inferred from another legal right that is expressly stated in a statute or at common law" (Garner, 2014, p. 1518).

The doctrine is associated with Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the U.S. Supreme Court inferred a right to privacy from several guarantees in the Bill of Rights, even though the Constitution does not mention privacy. That right later served as the basis for recognizing a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973), which the Court subsequently overruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022).

In short, a penumbral right is an implied right: a right that is not expressly stated but is derived from rights that are.

Why the "Faithful" Version Fails the Reader

Version 1, hak penumbra, is not technically wrong. Its problem is that most Indonesian readers will not understand it. Penumbra is not part of Indonesian legal vocabulary. Readers who recognize the word at all will most likely associate it with astronomy. The translation therefore presents a term that sounds authoritative but communicates no clear legal concept.

The English-speaking reader of the original understands the term through an established legal doctrine. The Indonesian reader of Version 1 has no such reference point. The word has been transferred, but the meaning has not.

Version 2, hak tersirat, solves this problem. In Indonesian, tersirat means "implied," as opposed to tersurat, meaning "expressly stated." The phrase captures precisely the concept defined in Black's Law Dictionary, and any Indonesian reader can understand it immediately. As the editor on this project, I revised the translation to hak tersirat. Where a text discusses American constitutional doctrine in depth, the original term can also be added in parentheses, hak tersirat (hak penumbra), to preserve a link to the source doctrine without sacrificing clarity.

What This Means for Your Legal Documents

This example comes from constitutional law, but the same problem arises in the documents that businesses and law firms handle every day: contracts, corporate documents, due diligence reports, regulatory filings, and legal correspondence. English legal terms are often rooted in common law concepts that have no direct counterpart in Indonesia's civil law system. When such terms are translated literally, the result may look correct while leaving the reader uncertain about what a clause actually means.

For you as the owner or user of the document, the consequences can be significant. A party may misinterpret its rights or obligations. A regulator, court, or business partner may read a provision differently from how it was intended. Decisions may be made on the basis of a text that does not say what the original says. In each case, the problem may not surface until much later, when correcting it is far more costly than getting it right in the first place.

This risk has become more relevant as many organizations now use machine translation and AI tools to translate legal documents. These tools are fast and often produce fluent output. However, literal renderings that look faithful but fail to convey the legal concept, like the one in Version 1, are precisely the kind of problem that fluent output can conceal. Because such errors look correct, they are difficult to detect for anyone who is not trained in both legal language and the legal concepts behind it.

The practical lesson is simple. A legal translation should be judged not by whether its words resemble the original, but by whether its readers understand the document exactly as the readers of the original do. Whether your documents are translated by a human translator or by AI, a review by a qualified legal translator is the most reliable way to ensure that they meet this standard.

Conclusion

The term penumbral right shows how a translation can appear faithful and still fail its purpose. A literal rendering preserved the form of the term but lost its meaning. An informed rendering, grounded in authoritative legal sources, conveyed the meaning clearly and accurately. For organizations that rely on translated legal documents, the difference between these two approaches is the difference between a document that merely looks right and one that can be relied upon.

About the Author

Hipyan Nopri is a senior English–Indonesian legal translator and editor with more than 36 years of professional experience. Through Doelkitep Penerjemah, he provides legal translation, bilingual legal review, editing, proofreading, and post-editing of machine and AI translations for law firms, companies, and international organizations. His work covers contracts, corporate documents, due diligence materials, and related legal correspondence.

If your organization relies on English–Indonesian legal documents, whether translated by a human translator or by AI, and you want to ensure that they say exactly what they are meant to say, you are welcome to get in touch here.

References

Garner, B. A. (Ed.). (2014). Black's Law Dictionary (10th ed.). St. Paul: Thomson Reuters.

Oran, D. (2008). Oran's Dictionary of the Law (4th ed.). Clifton Park: Thomson Delmar Learning.

US Legal Forms. (n.d.). Penumbra. Retrieved from https://legal-resources.uslegalforms.com/p/penumbra

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).