The Portuguese noun aval poses particular challenges to a legal translator, which revolve on its wide, context-dependent semantic drift: in financial documents, it normally means “surety” or “guarantee” (e.g. Nenhum aval é necessário para este financiamento, “no guarantee is required for this loan”). By contrast, its meaning in judicial, and even political contexts is “endorsement”, “consent”, “backing”, or “clearance”, among other variants (e.g., a aposição de aval pelo garantidor, “the signed endorsement by the guarantor”,  uma constituição requer e precisa do aval dos cidadãos, “a constitution requires citizens’ consent”). 

These nuances are easy to grasp when context is univocal. Univocity is a rare occurrence, however –particularly in commercial litigation, where both domains of this term’s usage tend to overlap. Further complicating things, court hearings often involve parties engaging in spontaneous, non-verbal cues that will escape any transcript not based on a video recording. These could be the mimicking of a signature, or a two-hand gesture commonly associated with money exchanging hands. The confluence of these factors makes the risk of misinterpretation both more likely and consequential, as reading the wrong meaning into the wrong context can seriously distort the original discussion (e.g. if the aval given by a specific party is construed as a financial commitment when what was given was a mere bureaucratic tick in a box, or vice versa).

In cases where usage – financial or legal – is clear, opting for an accurate term in the target language is the best option. However, it is often the case that, because of the amount of documents to be translated, usage varies across source materials: aval can appear both as a financial and as a legal term. In such cases, a faithful approach can bear the appearance of inconsistency through disparate renderings of the same term. In a large, collaborative project, these can be established by a terminologist and written into the glossary in the form of conditional instructions. Translators will then need to use their judgment when following the instructions as they work their way through the corpus for a specific subject.

Another option, best suited to risk-averse clients, would be not to translate aval at all, leaving it in the original Portuguese. This has the advantage of maintaining homogeneity across the corpus. The specific meaning will usually be made clear to the reader by the surrounding context, and further clarification can be provided in parentheses based on the client’s approved sources. Leaving aval untranslated also facilitates accounting for the verb avalizar and its derived forms. For example, empresas avalizadas pelo Estado can be rendered as companies for which the State has provided an “aval”.

Whatever approach may be chosen, the difficulties in translating aval ultimately point to misalignments between common- and civil law systems, as well as to idiosyncrasies of Portuguese institutions. Such circumstances cannot be undone by a translator, but can be mitigated for the reader’s benefit.