Machine Translation - ILS

Foreign Languages and Machine Translation

Once the documents containing foreign languages are identified, and the critical foreign language(s) are selected, ILS employs machine translation to enable English speaking reviewers to quickly identify and triage relevant documents without the need to first incur costly and time-consuming human translations. But not all machine translation systems are created equal.

ILS created an analytics driven - machine translation workhorse and hired linguists to teach it particular foreign languages with specific focus on case specific subject matter. For example, in the Toyota Unintended Acceleration Cases, we had to program for many nuances of Japanese language like differentiating between Tundra as frozen ground and Tundra as a pickup truck.

We’ve developed workflows, algorithms, and processes to find gaps in productions, to identify missing custodians, to uncover the hidden truths that Plaintiff counsel knows in their gut must exist, but which often require ILS’ special technology and acumen to find. We understand the importance of utilizing native speakers to program the machine so that we use the construction of native language, including idioms, local expressions and slang to find instances of the concepts being sought. We test our results to fine tune them so that we can rely on the machine to find the kernels of evidence we’re looking for amongst the massive document dumps we’ve received.

Cross the Language Barrier

Machine translations enable reviewers to readily perform keyword searches in English and to review the identified documents in English to gain approximate understandings of their contents, relevance and importance. The machine translation also provides a basis to determine if a document appears to be sufficiently important to justify the time and costs of certified human translation.

Because of the sheer volume of the documents produced, and the high cost of hiring foreign language-speaking document reviewers, our machine translation process is essential for Plaintiff in identifying relevant foreign-language documents efficiently and economically.

One of our most extensively accessed service products is our Enhanced MT service, which goes beyond the initial MT in terms of accuracy and usefulness. Algorithms based on generic dictionaries often produce nonsensical English translations because the nuances of localized idiomatic expressions are lost or generic dictionaries differ from commonly used industry or corporate jargon.

Technology + Human Linguists = Accuracy

For Enhanced MT, ILS engages qualified linguists to analyze a set of produced documents and develop project-specific dictionaries and translation memory which contains bilingual pairs of human-translated sentences. Feeding these human-created resources into the process enhances the quality of translation, and it is especially effective when there is a significant number of important words, phrases and internal jargon that are not translated properly with generic dictionaries.

ILS Enhanced MT Includes

Tailored to specific industry, domain, case or project
Customized for accuracy and readability
Fine-tuned for case specific accuracy
Fast, Scalable & Secure - Reliable - Affordable