A two hundred thousand document Mandarin population cannot be human-translated on any budget anyone will approve, and leaving it untranslated means reviewing blind. The way out is translating at three different depths.

Multilingual review goes wrong in one of two directions. Translate everything properly and the budget is gone before review starts. Translate nothing and reviewers are guessing at documents they cannot read.

Neither is necessary, because not every document is for the same purpose.

Three tiers, scoped before the work starts

• Triage — machine translation with light post-editing, enough to decide whether a document is responsive or relevant. Most of a population never needs more than this, and this is where the volume reduction happens.
• Review — full post-editing by a certified legal translator for documents that will be read closely, with terminology checked against the matter glossary.
• Certified — a signed certificate of accuracy for the subset that will be filed, produced, logged in detail or put to a witness.

Scoping the tiers at the outset means the budget is set by what the case needs rather than by the page count. Deciding tier by tier as documents surface means paying certified rates for material nobody will ever cite.

What machine translation cannot be used for

Triage is a legitimate and necessary use. A privilege determination is not. Neither is a document that will be quoted, relied on or interpreted, because a call made from a machine translation is a call made from an approximation of the text.

That line matters more in privilege review than anywhere else, because the consequence of a miss is a waiver argument rather than a supplemental production.

Terminology consistency is the unglamorous part

On a long matter the same technical term comes back three different ways across three productions, and opposing counsel notices. A matter glossary maintained from the first batch forward decides the translation of each key term once and applies it everywhere, including by translators who join later.

This is the thing that separates a litigation translation workflow from a translation order, and it is also what makes later rounds faster rather than more expensive.

Why the combination is the point

A translation agency returns a stack of translated PDFs and you still have to get them into a review platform with their families and metadata intact. An eDiscovery vendor sends the population out to a translation subcontractor, and you lose custody, consistency and a week.

We do both in one building, which means the translated document arrives in the review set rather than next to it, and privileged material never goes to an open marketplace. Privileged and sensitive documents are handled by ATA-certified translators on staff. Surge volume and rare language pairs go to an NDA-bound managed vendor network, not to a marketplace.

Accelerated forums

Section 337 investigations run to a target date set early in the investigation and rarely moved, in a forum five miles from our office, with populations that are frequently majority non-English. Each administrative law judge sets the procedural schedule and their own ground rules, so the only reliable dates are the ones in your schedule — but in every version of it, translation cannot be the workstream still running when the prehearing submissions are due.

So translation runs in parallel with English review rather than after it. We are also already working in the vocabulary, which is not a small thing when a schedule is tight.

Delivery

• Translated documents loaded alongside their source, with family relationships preserved
• Metadata and numbering consistent across the translated set, under a convention fixed at the first volume
• Certified translations issued with a signed certificate of accuracy where a document will be filed
• Chain of custody documented from receipt through production
• Partial translations marked as partial on their face, because one produced without saying so is a problem of its own

What we do

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. provides foreign language document review with ATA-certified staff translators in house — three-tier scoping agreed before work starts, a matter glossary maintained from the first batch, review by people who read the documents, certified translation for anything that will be used, and translated sets delivered into the review platform with families and numbering intact.

From Arlington, Virginia, five miles from the Commission, for counsel managing custodians anywhere.

Related: Mandarin document review, foreign language privilege review, multilingual review cost, Section 337 translation services, certified translation for court filing, legal translation glossary, overseas custodian collection.

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. reviews multilingual populations from Arlington, Virginia, five miles from the Commission, for litigation, arbitration and regulatory matters worldwide.

Multilingual population and a budget that will not cover translating it? Send us the volume and the language mix. The tiering conversation is where the money is. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com