The number depends almost entirely on one decision: how much of the population you translate to what standard.
A foreign-language review population has exactly two ways to go wrong. Translate all of it to certified standard and you will spend six figures on documents that turn out to be irrelevant. Translate none of it and you are reviewing blind, which is worse. Everything useful happens between those two mistakes.
The variable that drives the bill is not the per-word rate. It is how many documents end up in which tier.
The three tiers
Triage. Machine translation with light post-editing, corrected to the point where a reviewer can tell what a document is about and whether it is responsive. Most of a large population never needs more than this, and on a 200,000-document Mandarin set the overwhelming majority of documents are routine business correspondence that triage disposes of permanently.
Review. Full post-editing by a certified legal translator, line by line against the source, with terminology checked against the matter glossary. This tier is for documents that will actually be read closely — the ones that survive responsiveness and matter to the issues.
Certified. A signed certificate of accuracy, for the subset that will be filed, produced as a certified translation, or put to a witness. This is the most expensive tier and it is almost always the smallest.
Why the tiering has to be scoped before the work starts
If nobody decides the tiers up front, the default is that everything gets treated the same way, and the way it gets treated is set by whichever vendor quoted first. We scope the tiers at intake against the actual population — language breakdown, document types, custodian roles, date ranges — so the budget is set by the case rather than by the page count.
Culling matters even more here than on an English matter, because every document you remove before translation is a document you never pay to translate. Deduplication, date filtering and search term analytics run before anything reaches a translator.
The hidden cost nobody quotes
Terminology drift. On a long matter the same technical term comes back three different ways across three productions, and opposing counsel notices. We maintain a matter-specific glossary from the first batch forward, applied to the machine translation engine during triage and to the human translators during full post-editing, so a key term is decided once and used everywhere.
The other hidden cost is rework. A translation delivered as a stack of PDFs has to be reconciled back into the review set by hand. We deliver translated documents loaded alongside their source with family relationships preserved, metadata intact and Bates consistency maintained, in load files for Questa, Relativity, RelativityOne, Everlaw, DISCO and Casepoint.
Why one vendor instead of two
Pro-Legal Services does the translation and the eDiscovery. Our legal translators are ATA-certified and on staff, so privileged material stays in our custody instead of going to an open marketplace, and surge volume goes to a managed network of NDA-bound legal linguists under our own project management. A translation agency would have to build a review platform to offer this. An eDiscovery vendor would have to hire certified translators. We did both, which is why the translated document arrives in the review set rather than in your inbox.
Related: foreign language document review, legal document translation services, machine translation post-editing, certified translation for court filing, cross-border discovery, ESI processing, managed document review, Section 337 translation services.
Pro-Legal Services, Inc. provides foreign language document review and certified legal translation from Arlington, Virginia, serving law firms and corporate legal departments in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia, and matters in federal and state courts nationwide.
Have a multilingual population and no budget to translate all of it? Send us the language breakdown and the document count. We will tell you what belongs in each tier — usually a far smaller certified set than you expected. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com