What is E-Discovery and its Relationship to Human and Machine Translation?
An e-discovery law firm, at the beginning of a litigation case, groups together a large amount of information which is collected together about the legal case it is dealing with and. It is determined what is going to be the most useful to the case. Litigation these days tends to cross borders because companies are far more globalised than ever before so translation becomes an important issue in e-discovery. Legal companies have to hire translators who have a vast amount of knowledge of translating concepts used in e-discovery. It’s only the best translation services who can offer translators with the calibre to perform effective e-discovery translations and the translation of litigation cases.
When a translation for an e-discovery case is needed, it follows a particular process which is as follows:
The litigation teams collect the required data, which they forward to their e-discovery internal litigation professional support team. The law firm will ensure members of their work force who have the required language skills will look through the documents and decide which ones need to be sent to a human translator to translate. Once the translation has been completed it will undertake a further review by an attorney who speaks that language. E-discovery legal case translations can be expensive because of the need to find attorneys with language skills who can sieve through the translations to ensure they are accurate.
Why machine translation isn’t used in e-discovery
Machine translation is only progressing very slowly when it comes to accuracy. This means that those involved in e-discovery litigation aren’t willing to use this type of translation in court because of the chance of it being too inaccurate to use in a legal context. Additionally, litigation cases are often confidential and leakage of information even accidentally when using online machine translation tools could affect the outcome of litigation.
Even though machine translations are often used to help speed up translation work they have yet to play an important role in the legal industry. If you require professional quality translation for e-discovery services the machine translation devices need to be customized and backed up by editors who are experts in legal translations especially in relation to e-discovery.
Conclusion on E-Discovery and its Relationship to Human and Machine Translation
For the moment, the relationship between e-discovery and translation favours using human translators over machine translations as they still produce more accurate results. This is a requirement for the translation of litigation documents used in e-discovery.
