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The legal field is notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. While other fields are increasingly using machine translation (MT), law firms have until recently relied on contract attorneys who speak the target language. Such bilingual attorneys have been responsible for reviewing large volumes of documents and translating relevant documents. The legal team then reviews portions of the documents to determine which documents can be officially used and, if necessary, requests certified translations.
Only when the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus infection began to have a significant impact on international litigation did many law firms begin to explore new ways to translate legal documents. With borders closed and outsourcing becoming more difficult, machine translation is being used to prepare multilingual legal documents on time. Today, more law firms than ever are using machine translation for legal documents to save time and money and increase efficiency, a trend that is particularly evident in antitrust litigation and international litigation matters.
Here we provide an overview of the use of MT in legal translation.
What is Machine Translation (MT)?
Before considering the benefits of machine translation (MT), it is necessary to understand what machine translation is and how it works. Simply put, machine translation is the automatic translation of text using a computer without human intervention.
The two most common types of machine translation are Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). NMT also uses data sets, but combines them with artificial intelligence (AI) and neural networks to produce results. NMT mimics the translator's thought process, rather than "guessing" a likely result. This method produces more natural translations than SMT, and SMT is gradually being phased out.
Three business people collaborating on a legal assignment
Four methods of machine translation
There are many ways to incorporate machine translation into a company's translation process. Here are four of the most common methods
Free MT services. Free online tools such as Google Translate can be useful for translating small amounts of content in a short amount of time. However, such tools are not ideal from a privacy and security perspective, as the data entered is used to train the MT engine.
Cloud MT. cloud services offered by large IT companies are suitable for those requiring large deployments. If you choose this option, you will need to have in-house experts (computer scientists or MT specialists) who can train you on the MT engine.
Best-of-breed MT, which integrates MT engines from different IT companies on a single platform. This is the most flexible approach because you can choose the MT engine that best suits your content type and language pair, improving quality while reducing costs.
On-premise MT. As the name suggests, this method places MT technology on your premises (on-premise). This is a convenient solution when you need complete control over your data. However, it is the most expensive option because it requires in-house MT servers to be trained and managed.
Which type of MT is best for you depends on a number of factors, including the type of content you are working with, the size of your project, your budget, and your internal resources. For example, a free MT service may be sufficient for short, general text, whereas a best-of-breed MT may be better suited for large volumes of multi-lingual documents. In addition, to maximize quality, the MT output should be modified through post-editing services by human translators.
Benefits of Incorporating MT into the Legal Translation Process
As mentioned above, using MT in a law firm can save significant time and money in the translation of legal documents through the following
Processing numerous multilingual legal documents simultaneously and quickly.
Determining which documents are relevant through a first-stage review
Reduce the number of contract attorneys.
Reduce the number of documents that must be prepared by human translators for litigation.
To enable machine translation to do this, the engine is trained using both domain-specific and case-specific data. The more relevant data is added, the more accurate the legal translation output will be. This reduces the number of contract attorneys needed to review foreign language documents in the first place, thereby reducing translation costs.
In addition to reducing translation costs and turnaround time, MT can be interfaced with an e-discovery platform, allowing for secure data transfer between parties. Simply select a document on the eDiscovery platform and it will automatically transfer the document to a customized MT engine. The MT engine automatically sends the translated data back to the platform and maps it to the source document (the document from which the translation originated).
