[…] So, why don’t members of Congress just take a look at the TPP? If the administration has signed off on the trade agreement involving the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, then where is the document?

For now, it is indisposed while getting cleaned up.

But it’s not taking a shower. Rather, the TPP is getting a “legal scrub.”

That’s the term used by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to describe the process that follows a handshake deal. Lawyers, translators and other staffers have to come up with the final, detailed language that ensures the deal is clear in each country.

That’s not easy. TPP includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. So documents have to line up precisely in English, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay and more.

The deal was closed on Monday, and later in the week, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman told reporters that scrubbing all of the words in a document covering 30 chapters may take about a month. More.

Read the full article and listen to the story in NPR here: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/11/447684250/scrubbing-a-trade-deal-translators-get-behind-the-ears-of-the-tpp

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.