Part 1 of 3: Intelligent Translation Services Consulting
If, like many of our clients, you’re leading a high-profile international legal case, these 3 challenges probably keep you up at night. They are Information Uncertainty, Timeline Uncertainty, and Budget Uncertainty.
Information Uncertainty is when a mountain emerges of foreign language documents that are central to your case. But they’re not in English. You’re not sure what’s in them. You don’t know the full extent of your client’s risk. And you’re going to have to rely on others — internal translators or external partners — to inform you.
Will they be right? And how much risk are you and your client facing?
The second major challenge is Timeline Uncertainty. The Court has imposed deadlines for you to produce thousands of documents — maybe tens or hundreds of thousands — in translated form. What combination of machine and human translation processes are needed to produce these on time? Is that enough time? What if an extension request isn’t granted?
The third major challenge is Budget Uncertainty. Translating hundreds of thousands of documents via human translators would cost your client a small fortune. It would also seriously strain your relationship to charge them that much.
Deploying machine translation technologies saves considerably, but sacrifices quality. True meaning can remain buried in hundreds of thousands of incomprehensible or imprecise partial sentences. How much should you spend for higher quality? How much is too much? How much is not enough?
The good news: We’ve thought long and hard about these issues during our 50+ years of serving major corporate and legal clients — including most of the Fortune 100 and AmLaw 100. And we’ve developed solutions and processes that address each concern.
In fact, we’ve taken it farther. For each of the 3 previously mentioned challenges, we’ve identified 3 contributing concerns. And for each of these sub-concerns, we’ve developed 3 solutions to help alleviate your fears.
What’s the math on that? It translates to 27 LSI solutions (critical process steps) to address 9 contributing concerns related to your 3 major challenges.
In the first of this 3-part article, we’ve outlined the 9 solution steps below that can help you feel more confident about the relevance, accuracy, and expertise associated with your foreign document translations. Here are the first 9 solution steps.
Major Challenge: Information Uncertainty
Contributing Concern: Relevance Uncertainty
Will all relevant content be correctly identified and categorized?
LSI Solution Steps:
- eDiscovery Audit — MT or Neural-based eDiscovery to enable preliminary evaluations and tagging of your client’s foreign-language content.
- Outliers Audit — Development and refinement of custom glossaries to clarify untranslated words and expressions.
- Post-Audit Validation — Human examination of MT results to validate, or modify, preliminary relevance and categorization decisions.
Contributing Concern: Expertise Uncertainty What additional industry, legal, or local/cultural expertise is needed? LSI Solution Steps:
- Subject-Matter Audit of preliminary screened content to determine, collaboratively with you, what additional data or industry expertise is needed.
- Localization Audit of high-value content to ensure that local meaning is correctly understood.
- Internal Audit by your in-house legal review team to identify potential gaps in expertise to be augmented by LSI’s resources or network.
Contributing Concern: Accuracy Uncertainty Will all relevant content be accurately translated, verified, and understood? LSI Solution Steps:
- Human Translation and Post-Editing of core segments of content that are of highest value and complexity — including for Court- or DOJ- mandated translation processes.
- Content Risk Analysis — Determine collaboratively the value of translating (and potential risk of not translating) each content grouping.
- Content Accuracy Analysis — Access the accuracy of content in high-value groupings using Blue Score or other means.
Finally, we don’t expect you to have 50 years of expertise in implementing these solution steps on your own. That’s why we’re here … to support you, to alleviate your concerns, and to ensure your success. To do that, we offer LSI Translation Services Consulting to assist you in all phases of foreign language legal translation. We know that winning your high-profile case is your only option. We’re here to help in that regard.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Linguistic Systems uses a combination of advanced proprietary technology and 7,500 skilled, certified translators to deliver high-quality translations in 120+ languages. With 50 years and billions of words of experience serving 25,000 clients, including many Fortune 100 and AmLaw100 firms, you can trust us with your must-win foreign language translation projects.
