The collection of documents from multiple jurisdictions raises all sorts of issues, not least the privacy and data protection regimes which might be encountered. The focus on this can sometimes obscure very practical difficulties which arise after that, including the certainty that multiple jurisdictions will involve multiple languages.

ZyLAB has a very wide range of tools for dealing with all aspects of managing an organisation’s information, including information governance and other proactive phases as well as eDiscovery. Many of these are available in bundles (the “Analytics Bundle”, the “eDiscovery Bundle”) as well as independently. Amongst the modules is one for machine translation.

ZyLAB’s Mary Mack has written a short paper called Facing Multilingual Litigation which briefly describes the problem faced by lawyers once the data collection is complete. She does it by reference to a case study involving the collection by a US law firm of documents from a company based in Spain.

ZyLAB’s language detection and machine translation technology was used to identify and then translate the documents right at the beginning of the process, allowing the US lawyers to form views as to relevance and importance without waiting for manual translation. This approach meant that the costs were less than 10% of the bill which would have been incurred had it been necessary to translate documents manually in order to get started. In practice, very few documents may have to be translated manually.

The critical components are volume, speed and accuracy, together with the fact that the ZyLAB machine translation technology is fully integrated with the other components of ZyLAB’s information management tools.