Interpreter & translator insurance

What interpreter and translator E&O actually responds to

A mistranslated dosage instruction, a contract clause rendered with the opposite meaning, a deposition transcript that misstates testimony. These are the claims that land on a language professional, and none of them are bodily injury or property damage, so a general liability policy does not answer them. Professional liability, written as Errors and Omissions, is the policy built for work product. The distinction matters because most agency contracts ask for both. General liability covers you tripping over a cable at a client site. E&O covers the words.

Interpreting and translation are rated differently

Carriers separate spoken-language interpreting from written document translation, and they separate both from American Sign Language work. The exposures genuinely differ:

• •Court and legal interpreting. Testimony rendered in real time with no chance to revise. Certified court interpreters working to NAJIT standards face the highest scrutiny, and errors surface in appeals.
• •Medical interpreting. Symptom descriptions, consent conversations, and discharge instructions. Certification through CCHI or NBCMI is common, and HIPAA obligations attach to everything you hear.
• •Conference and simultaneous interpreting. High speed, high stakes, often broadcast or recorded.
• •Document translation. Immigration filings, contracts, technical manuals, and certified translations for USCIS. An error here has a paper trail and a long tail.
• •ASL interpreting. Often credentialed through RID, frequently in educational and medical settings.

Freelance work versus running an agency

Most language professionals work as independent contractors for several agencies at once. That structure creates a specific problem: the agency carries its own policy, but that policy protects the agency. When a client alleges an error, the agency contract almost always pushes responsibility back to the linguist who did the work. This is why agencies ask for certificates of insurance before assigning jobs, and why they often want to be named as additional insured. Common requirements run to one million dollars per occurrence and two million aggregate, though it varies by agency and by the type of work. If you run your own agency and subcontract to other linguists, that is a different conversation. Say so when you request a quote.

Confidentiality is part of the exposure

Interpreters and translators handle medical records, sealed legal filings, immigration documents, and unreleased business material. A laptop stolen from a car, a misdirected email, or a cloud account left open can expose all of it. Cyber liability sits alongside E&O for this reason. Many language professionals carry both, particularly those working in medical or legal settings where confidentiality obligations are written into statute rather than just contract.