Technology Resources for Arbitration Practitioners - Translation and interpretation
Translation of documents is critical in international arbitration, both in connection with the review of large volumes of documents in multiple languages that must be translated within short timelines before they can be reviewed and/or produced, and for presenting documents to a tribunal or opposing party in the designated language of the arbitration.
Advances in AI applied to language have resulted in sophisticated machine translation applications that can significantly reduce the cost and time of manual (vendor-based) translation.
Machine translation is particularly helpful during the first stage of document review, where the reviewer needs to understand the gist of large volumes of documents in another language but does not necessarily need a full edited professional translation of the document. Machine translation can be paired with post-translation human editing to reduce costs, prevent errors, enhance formatting and improve consistency. Below are a few examples of vendors that offer translation services.
Web-based translation service offering translations between nine major European languages. A pro-version is also available, which does not store the text being translated.
www.deepl.com/en/translator
Free web-based service that translates words, phrases and webpages between English and over 100 languages.
www.translate.google.com
Multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft, which is integrated across multiple products, such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Lync, Yammer, Skype and Internet Explorer, among others. Microsoft Translator also offers text and speech translation through cloud services. Text translation services are available in over 65 languages and offered for free (up to two million characters per month) or on a paid basis (supporting billions of characters per month and including enhanced security features). Speech translation is also offered based on the time of the audio stream.
www.mindjet.com
Global company offering a range of translation and document review services, including the following:
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Machine translation. TransPerfect’s proprietary machine translation engines can be used on a project-by-project basis, and is typically used in large-scale foreign language cases to do a rough first-level translation, allowing the legal team to further identify key documents, which can then be human-translated with full proofread and edit by legal language experts. This machine translation tool can also be installed as an application at a law firm for use on a monthly subscription basis for quick, on-the-fly translation of excerpts of text, full documents or URLs for webpages. Offers additional privacy and confidentiality compared with some free online machine translators.
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Relativity plug-ins available for foreign language identification. This allows batching out of foreign language files for either foreign language document review or machine translation.
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Foreign language search-term development. TransPerfect offers a team of experts to prepare idiomatically symmetrical terms in multiple languages to ensure all key documents are captured.
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Predictive coding with foreign language matters. This is aided by foreign language detection, OCR and recoding analytics often built for English-only documents.
www.transperfect.com
Disclaimer: Due to the very nature and dynamics of the subject of this guide, the examples should not be considered exhaustive, and merely represent a sample of the potential applications available. There are numerous other vendors that provide similar services and products to the ones described, and the presence of any particular vendor or product in this guide does not reflect any qualitative judgment about the suitability or capability of that vendor or product. The goal is to periodically update and edit the guide to reflect new technological advances, and add new or delete obsolete, applications, programs or vendors. The IBA Arb40 Subcommittee does not endorse or recommend any particular technology, vendor, software or program listed below, nor can it vouch for the security, cost or appropriateness of any of the listed technology, which must be assessed by practitioners on a case-by-case basis. The descriptions of particular programs, software and vendors were not provided by the vendors themselves, and the IBA Arb40 Subcommittee takes no responsibility for errors in those descriptions. All technology should be thoroughly explored and vetted by the arbitration practitioner prior to use.