In the world of asset recovery, the meaning of simple words causes serious, even grave, problems. As Kimon Friar, an American translator of Greek poetry observed, “Even the simplest word can never be rendered with its exact equivalent into another language”. Kimon Friar was working with poetry where nuance, subjectivity and personal emotion are vital elements. You might think that legal translation is dry, objective and more susceptible to objective definition. But the stock in trade of lawyers the world over is to argue with each other over the meaning of individual words in their own languages. Not just lawyers but law enforcers and law makers. In an attempt to make international AML and asset recovery work, the globally agreed international language of cooperation is English. This chapter gives a series of examples where even simple words with narrow meanings have been misunderstood. The Kimon Friar problem was actually relatively simple compared to international legal cooperation. Mr Friar was working from Greek into English, whereas international lawyers make requests in one local language (such as Greek), have the words translated into English and then translated into another, different local language (such as Turkish). The answer to the request is then created in Turkish, translated into English and then into Greek.

These multiple translation steps have one important result, time after time: a failure of international asset recovery to work.

For example, over an 18-month period, German authorities refused to help with a series of Albanian police financial investigation requests for information about specific crimes committed in Germany by Albanians.1 The request was made in English, the language of financial investigation. The German translator had used the word ‘grave’ to describe the legal threshold for providing assistance, the Albanian translator had chosen ‘serious’ to describe the crimes in the requests. The words did not match so the Germans, quite correctly, refused to help. As none of the investigators spoke English themselves, they did not know what the problem was. No blame is ascribed to anyone, but getting lost in translation hurt the victims in Germany and Albania, because solvable crimes went unsolved. This kind of thing is multiplied by the number of frontiers in the world and the number of crimes.