Remy van Tol (asker) Jun 6, 2016:

Thanks all for replying and your valued help!

Tim Friese Jun 6, 2016:

@osocanoso Thanks for weighing in and I appreciate your legal expertise!

You're right that the word encumber is redundant, in both English and Spanish. Like I mentioned in my answer, though, it is present in the source, so if we have a way to idiomatically render it in the target (which I believe we do), we should do so.

Lastly I'd like to clarify what google is used for. The best use of it, which is the use I made of it here, is to find lots of examples of usage 'in the wild' as it were. Some of these will be garbage, but in browsing through them, you can quickly see how terms are used in practice, in many cases by other trained professionals. The search results include plenty of American law offices, court documents, SEC filings, etc. Where we believe that common usage should be avoided, we don't have to go with the crowd, but it is undeniably good to know what usages are common, and to have a way to verify our intuitions about what is and is not common.

Happy Monday all!

osocanoso Jun 5, 2016:

The fact that the property is encumbered has nothing to do with the price of the rent. I am a practicing lawyer, and telling me that a mortgage is an encumbrance is like telling a mathematician that pi is an irrational number. My knowledge of how this kind of language is used is based upon obtaining a law degree and writing dozens of real estate contracts. I didn't have to go to the dictionary or to google to find out that a mortgage is an encumbrance.

In fact, the word "encumbrance" is redundant, since a mortgage is already mentioned and a mortgage is by definition an encumbrance. In the end it probably doesn't make any difference.

The bigger point here is that you are obviously not a lawyer and you are weighing in on a topic in which you are out of your depth. All you do is muddy the waters when you give opinions based upon google and free dictionaries. We all have access to those, and the purpose of this forum is to seek advice that can't be found in those sources.

A clue is when someone answers with a confidence lefel of 5. I don't know of anyone on this forum who is getting rich answering theses questions; we´re just trying to help. Don´t make it hard

Adrian MM. (X) Jun 2, 2016:

target-lingo @ asker Pls. clarify what is your target-English: 1. US 2.UK 3. Oz/NZ 4. neutral 'offshore' or 5. Peruvian market bazaar-speak.

Tim Friese Jun 2, 2016:

@osocanoso I think you're not quite in line with the mainstream of US legal usage here. Lots of US legal documents talk about mortgages as encumbrances and properties as being encumbered by them.

The definition from West's Encyclopedia of American Law found at http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/encumbrance gives this definition for encumbrance: A burden, obstruction, or impediment on property that lessens its value or makes it less marketable. An encumbrance (also spelled incumbrance) is any right or interest that exists in someone other than the owner of an estate and that restricts or impairs the transfer of the estate or lowers its value. This might include an Easement, a lien, a mortgage, a mechanic's lien, or accrued and unpaid taxes.

Here are 48k hits for "property encumbered", and you can see that many are referring to mortgages:

https://www.google.com/search?q="property is encumbered"

Here are 57k hits for "encumbered by a mortgage": https://www.google.com/search?q="encumbered by a mortgage%22