Though the effects of globalization on other industries have received more press and public attention, few professions have been as profoundly impacted by this trend as the legal profession. Today everything from civil litigation to criminal law is awash with international connections and issues.
Language differences alone have been a significant problem for many attorneys—not to mention alternative legal systems and cultural sensitivities. From personal law practitioners dealing with multilingual families to intellectual property firms sourcing patents from around the world, working globally has become a challenge—and, for some firms, a competitive advantage.
So the question is simple: how can legal professionals address this challenge in an effective manner, getting the quality they need to present to the courts without blowing expenses out of all proportion.
The Ad Hoc Method
The “Ad hoc method” refers to what has been the general trend in the legal profession: confronting multilingual challenges on a case by case basis. Outside of a few large international firms with the means and resources to hire specialized legal professionals in whatever country they operate, most firms essentially wait until a problem arises and then respond.
This method tends to involve hiring a translator or translation service solely for the case in question. Though there are many top-quality translation services available, one never knows about the level of work until the finished product arrives. If a case is on a tight deadline, this obviously leads to the increased risk of being "stuck" with a poor-quality translation or the translation of a lot of immaterial information at your expense.
When this method is used for litigation, case history shows it has not been terribly effective. Suits and cases have been dismissed or overturned due to translation problems. Even the United States government has repeatedly had evidence in major terrorism cases thrown out by the courts due to improper or incorrect translations.
The Technology Option
Another avenue for obtaining translations at minimal expense has been to use machine translation, either online services or one of the many software packages that are available. These are, without question, much less expensive than human translation.
The quest for effective machine translation programs that can both translate individual words and the meaning and implication of full statements has been ongoing since the beginning of the computer age. Technological advances have led to remarkable improvements in some languages, but not all. Languages that have many dedicated, multilingual programming experts working on them are advancing faster than others.
However, one advantage of machine translation is that a very large volume of material can be quickly and inexpensively translated, allowing the legal team to pinpoint relevant documentation. In such a case, the legal team is not seeking high quality—they just need to cull through the data. But once relevant documents are identified for further investigation, machine translation is at its limit—alone it cannot provide high quality.
Which Way Forward: Machine + Human Translation
McElroy Translation has worked with legal and patent firms for more than two decades and intimately understands the issue of sorting through foreign-language content quickly and cost-effectively—as well as the need to maintain quality. That is why McElroy debuted its (McElroy + Machine) Translation (MT)² suite of services earlier this year. The combination of machine and human translation offered by (MT)² has given firms the ability to process large amounts of non-English documentation that can then be fine-tuned by a translator with subject matter expertise.
The (McElroy+Machine) Translation suite of services includes MT PLUS and MT SUPREME. Enhanced MT PLUS provides a much more targeted and accurate search space than a generic machine translation output. It does so by combining MT processing with a proprietary MT PLUS filter, which applies custom dictionaries and technical terminology resources as well as any client-specific translation memories. The service also targets documents of interest for human-certified translations.
The real benefit of MT PLUS is the tremendous increase in searchability over a basic machine translation system that is not trained for the field in question. In fact, test results for MT PLUS are dramatic. For example, in a major ongoing IP litigation support project, an eDiscovery search engine missed basic terms such as “wet etch” or even “process defect” that were mistranslated in the raw version, but with the enhanced MT PLUS version, the search engine was successful.
MT SUPREME is a customized SMT domain development service offered by McElroy and Asia Online, the statistical machine translation expert. For incredibly high-volume projects that require a custom domain, this service combines a continuous improvement environment from Asia Online with human subject matter experts to drastically increase the quality of machine translation.
Pilot projects of (MT)² have proven it to be effective and efficient for law firms. By all accounts, the system offers a cost-effective opening to a lot of information that was previously unavailable due to the inability to access the documents, the questionable quality of machine translation, or the expense of certified human translation. Thanks to the (MT)² solution, these barriers are no longer relevant.