Beneficio, Aprehensión, Sin Perjuicio: Three Traps in One Sentence
Phase One Spanish written component. You must render into English: "El juez le hizo saber al imputado que, de no comparecer a la audiencia señalada, se le revocará el beneficio y se librará orden de aprehensión en su contra, sin perjuicio de las demás consecuencias legales que correspondan." The options include: (A) "The judge informed the accused that, should he fail to appear at the scheduled hearing, the benefit will be revoked and an order of apprehension issued against him, without prejudice to the other legal consequences that may apply." (B) "The judge informed the defendant that, if he does not appear at the scheduled hearing, his release will be revoked and an arrest warrant issued against him, in addition to any other legal consequences." (C) "The judge informed the defendant that, if he failed to appear at the scheduled hearing, his release would be revoked and an arrest warrant issued against him, without prejudice to any other legal consequences that may apply." No dictionary, no extra time.
1. Choose among A, B, and C, and identify what each of the two rejected options gets wrong.
Read the worked answer
Option C. It is the only one wrong on no point of legal effect.
- A fails on two calques. Beneficio in this procedural register is a conditional release arrangement (a pretrial or conditional-release benefit), not a "benefit" in the ordinary English sense; a U.S. judge reading "the benefit will be revoked" will not know what is being revoked. Orden de aprehensión is a warrant of arrest; "order of apprehension" is not a term of art in U.S. procedure and carries an unwanted connotation of fear or capture.
- B fails on the reservation. Sin perjuicio de is a genuine reservation of rights - literally and functionally "without prejudice to." B's "in addition to" converts a reservation into an additive list, which matters later when the record is tested on which consequences were noticed to the defendant.
- C also handles the conditional correctly: de no comparecer is a future-oriented condition, and English idiom renders it with the present ("if he fails to appear") or a formal inverted conditional ("should he fail to appear"), never with a past tense.
Note the discipline: read the whole option. A is seductive because "should he fail to appear" is the most elegant conditional on the page - elegance in one clause is frequently bait for a calque elsewhere.
2. The source uses imputado. Compare 'defendant,' 'accused,' and 'charged person' for this record, and say what would make you deviate from your default.
Read the worked answer
Default to defendant. In U.S. court register, defendant is the unmarked term for the person against whom the proceeding is brought; it is what the judge, clerk, and reporter will say all day. The accused is grammatically fine and appears in some statutory and journalistic registers, but in a U.S. courtroom record it reads as marked, and in some contexts is associated specifically with extradition. Charged person is narrower and appears mainly in statute.
Deviation triggers:
- Procedural stage matters to the record. In many Latin American systems imputado can cover the investigation stage before formal prosecution, while procesado signals formal prosecution and acusado the accusation itself. If the stage is genuinely at issue in the proceeding, you do not fix this by changing the English noun - you keep the register-appropriate defendant and, if the record needs it, add a short neutral gloss on the record rather than importing foreign procedure into the English term.
- The term is defined in the document. If the document itself defines imputado, follow the definition.
What you do not do: invent a hybrid ("the imputed") or alternate between terms within one proceeding, which makes the record look like it concerns different people.
3. Explain how you handle the future forms se revocará and se librará, and why a literal 'will be revoked' is or is not correct here.
Read the worked answer
"Will be revoked" and "will be issued" are correct, and here is the reasoning rather than the reflex.
Spanish legal drafting uses the future indicative both for genuine prediction and for directive force (what shall happen as a matter of law). English splits those jobs between will and shall/must. The judgment call is which job the source is doing:
- This is a judge's advisory to the defendant about consequences that follow automatically from nonappearance. It is not the operative ordering language of a decree, and no one is being commanded to revoke anything.
- Therefore the predictive will is right, and escalating to must be revoked would overstate the source.
- Conversely, is revoked (present) would understate it - it would describe a present state rather than a consequence triggered by future nonappearance.
The mechanical point to protect: do not let the passive se pull you into an agentless English passive that hides who acts. "His release will be revoked" is acceptable when the actor is institutional and obvious; if the record needs the actor, name it ("the court will revoke his release").