NBREA – Bilingual Documentation
The New Brunswick Real Estate Association (NBREA) is a provincial association of approximately 1,400 real estate professionals that regulates, advocates for, and educates its members to protect the public interest and advance the profession. In particular, the NBREA investigates and resolves complaints under the REALTOR® Code of Ethics, and all documentation in this respect must be bilingual under New Brunswick’s Official Languages Act. In addition, buyers and sellers in New Brunswick have the right to receive information in their official language of choice, which means that documents such as real estate forms and explanations, consumer guides and complaints or disciplinary information must be available in both French and English.
The Problem
While the NBREA had worked with another translation agency in the past, the agency was reliant on a specific translator dedicated to their organization. When that translator was no longer available, the NBREA began to look for professional translators who could ensure that the English and French versions carried the same meaning and authority, which is essential in regulatory and legal contexts.
In addition to ensuring that its content is precise and legally sound in both languages, the NBREA needed to ensure that all information related to complaints and proceedings remained confidential.
The Solution
Working with Word+Style ensures that the NBREA deals only with a single point of contact while having access to a qualified team, allowing for shorter deadlines without compromising on quality.
To ensure consistency between documents relating to the same complaint filed against a real estate professional, a bilingual project manager manages projects for the NBREA, providing reference documents from previous translations when necessary, as well as quality assurance. This includes managing NBREA bilingual templates to speed up the translation process.
With respect to confidentiality, the NBREA creates requests and uploads their documents for translation to Word+Style’s secure portal, as it provides more security than sending documents via email. In addition, all Word+Style collaborators sign confidentiality agreements to legally protect the client’s sensitive data.
The Outcome
Word+Style manages multiple requests from the NBREA each month relating to various complaints, whose proceedings sometimes span multiple months. These documents range in length, from emails containing a few shorts lines, to dozens of pages relating to a single complaint. Word+Style’s project managers maintain detailed records of each request, as well as all original documents and their translations.
As the claims are filed in New Brunswick, Word+Style also ensures that the translators working on documents from the NBREA are located in New Brunswick, and are familiar with the nuances of Acadian French and the idiosyncrasies of living in a bilingual province. This is made possible thanks to bilingual project managers who now understand the NBREA’s needs in order to provide accurate and consistent translations.
Word+Style has been able to assist in our various translation needs, but most importantly, those translations related to our complaints and discipline process. Their use of an electronic database for managing our translation projects helps us keep track of the translations that have been requested, and provides a central location to upload and download our documents. A true one-stop-shop.
~ Mitch McLean, Office of the Registrar, New Brunswick Real Estate Association