Multilingual Challenges in Cross-Border Litigation: How to Overcome Obstacles with Translation Technology

As globalization deepens, business disputes, white-collar crimes and antitrust cases cross borders more and more frequently. When cases involve multiple languages, the complexity of electronic discovery and legal investigation increases significantly. Every year, there are a large number of non-English cases involving hundreds of millions of non-English documents. In this case, every link must fully consider the challenges and difficulties brought about by language differences, which requires a deep combination of translation and technology.

The Challenges of Multilingual Litigation

Electronic documents and communication records play a vital role in case investigations. However, when cases involve data in different languages, case teams face a huge language barrier in understanding the evidence. This barrier can usually be overcome through some means, but not all solutions are equally effective. Specifically, when choosing a workflow, factors such as cost, speed, and quality must be weighed, which requires us to find the right balance among these aspects.

Symptoms of language disorders

Search indexing and translation of non-English search terms

For example, the proximity search operators used when searching and the differences between SQL search indexes and Japanese.

For any language, the search index needs to structure and standardize the text in the document, which provides the basis for subsequent text search. Each language is represented differently in the index, so the impact on the search results is also different. Especially when dealing with Japanese, its morphological characteristics often have a significant impact on the search results.

Take "Toshiba" and "Sony" as examples. In English, the W/10 operator can find sentences with a distance of 10 words between "Toshiba" and "Sony". However, in Japanese, due to different word segmentation rules, the W/10 operator can only find content between about two to three actual words. Therefore, if more accurate search results are needed, the search distance must be adjusted according to the language.

In addition, morphological differences in Japanese, such as the different use of katakana and kanji, also require search operators to be adjusted. For example, "Toshiba" and "Sony" in Japanese are represented by kanji and katakana respectively, so the operator needs to be adjusted appropriately when searching to ensure an accurate match.

Challenges in machine translation and review

Machine translation (MT) is an important tool for solving translation problems in multilingual cases. However, the initial output of machine translation often becomes the basis for lawyers to understand documents. If there are errors in the translation results, it may cause the lawyer's understanding of the case to deviate from the facts, which in turn affects the handling of the case.

For example, the word "Toshiba" in Japanese may be misunderstood as "East Lawn" during machine translation due to the complexity of the Japanese language structure, which will undoubtedly cause serious misunderstandings. Japanese characters do not have clear word separators, which makes it easy for machine translation engines to have problems when segmenting words. Especially when dealing with words involving multiple characters, machine translation engines may not be able to accurately identify word boundaries, resulting in translation errors.

In addition, the morphological characteristics of Japanese are also a major challenge in machine translation. Japanese words can be composed of multiple characters, and the character combinations are diverse. When performing word segmentation, the machine translation engine needs to pay special attention to these changes, otherwise it may mistranslate or miss important information.

Core elements of translation solutions

To overcome these language barriers and ensure that the case handling is not affected, it is crucial to choose the right translation service provider. In multilingual cases, the legal team needs to work with a professional translation company that is well versed in linguistics and e-discovery technology. The translation company not only needs to provide accurate language translation, but also needs to combine the technical background of e-discovery to help the legal team deal with complex language challenges during data processing, review and production stages.

In addition, professional translation companies should also provide multilingual technical support to ensure that the translated content matches the case requirements. For example, during the search process, the translation company should adjust the use of search operators according to the morphological characteristics of different languages to ensure that the case team can obtain accurate evidence.

Conclusion

With the increase in cross-border cases brought about by globalization, handling multilingual data has become an important challenge faced by legal teams. By deeply combining translation technology and electronic discovery tools, language barriers can be effectively overcome to ensure the smooth progress of the case. In this process, choosing a translation service provider with technical expertise has become a key factor in ensuring the success of the case.

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