Deposit vs. deposition
Hello everyone, my name is Greg. Thank you for joining me for TransLegal's lesson of the week.
Once again today we're going to be discussing commonly confused terms in the legal English world and, as you know, we here at TransLegal, part of our job is to help you through the minefields and the complexities and the mazes that you may encounter in your legal English world as far as the commonly confused terms and terminology that you might encounter, and that's why we're here.
One of the most commonly confused terms and things that we get asked about a lot are these two here which is deposit and deposition.
Now deposit is what you're probably most familiar with and that's merely placing funds or money into a bank account, that's the most common usage of deposit. There are other uses when you're depositing security and things like that, but it's placing or setting something in a position of trust.
Now deposit is both the verb and the noun. You deposit money in a bank account, that's the verb and you make a deposit, that's the noun form.
The second term, deposition, is sometimes confused with this in the sense that sometimes people want to use the word deposition for the noun form of deposit, meaning "he made a deposition into the bank". This is actually incorrect in legal English.
Further complicating matters is the fact that the word deposition or deposition in certain other languages actually means to deposit which is probably where, if you're confused right now, where your confusion lies. But in legal English the word deposition is something completely unlike the monetary meaning of deposit and a deposition is really a pre-trial interview of witnesses where prior to trial, in the course of litigation, you meet with potential witnesses and they are under oath or have some other means by which you are guaranteeing the truthfulness of their testimony and you take their testimony just as you would at trial with both sides having their counsel present and it's really a pre-trial stage, if you will, which is useful for evidentiary purposes and there's a whole other set of rules when it comes to depositions, but for your purposes now it's just important to note the distinction between the two and not to mix up the two. When you're dealing with money, again, this deposit works for both the noun and the verb and you should really stay away from this term unless you are talking about this pre-trial interview of witnesses.
So that has been TransLegal's lesson of the week. It is pay day today so I'm now going to deposit my cheque into my bank account.
Thanks for listening.