Law Technology Today From the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center
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What is Machine Translation?
Machine Translation is an automated software-based machine translation process designed to translate a large number of documents quickly. Ideally, law firms use machine translation for reference documents, litigation documents, culling documents form a pile of the available set, discovering of legal clauses, and identifying necessary documents for review and processing.
Machine translations can also refer as a literal translation process, and it is unaware of any context of grammatical nuance. It is likely to offer a considerable amount of support by reducing mountains of paperwork into molehills. Hence, law firms can identify and select those documents that need a higher precision degree confidently. Also, machine translation can be paired with post-editing done by humans to exclude every possible error and un-clarities that can be done in a translation context.
Furthermore, if budget constraints allow, machine translations can be optimally used by many law firms and translation service providers to accurate software engines. They can be built around a firm’s customized needs in the field of law, and they can be integrated with relevant projects.
Need for machine translation technology in law firms
Law firms are widely impacted and benefited from machine translation. In the discovery process, notably, there was a need for documentation in the build-up to cases, which is why machine translations were needed to reduce the time and cost in the legal market. Moreover, many legal teams can get translated documents earlier, and translation services may not cost them as much as a full transcript comparatively.
Machine translation services help improve security and confidentiality as the data is stored on software so it can be protected as per the agency specifications. This is the reason why Google translation uses professional services while dealing with clients globally rather than their own translation software.
Challenges in cases
The state policies of Europe and the United States don’t make the processes easy. There are many laws that restrict personal data sharing. Organizations like banks and intelligence firms are strictly prohibited from sharing information or transferring it without permission. Hence, laws only permit firms to share those data sets which are provided by customers freely.
This may add a lengthy litigation process because, after the collection of necessary shreds of evidence, it is needed to translate it by the law firm. Hence, media translation technologies are required in order to design and boost their efficiency.
Benefits of machine translation in law
Machine translation quickly translates a text document into multiple languages. The software is beneficial in far many ways like a collection of ESI by law firms in foreign languages, and staff van reviews them and translate them to keep them as a piece of evidences. These software hence helps to strengthen cases.
The translations provided by Machine translations are not designed to use in official capacities. However, it enables staff to review pieces of evidence in initial stages more quickly. These software provide word-for-word and literal translations and can be used more efficiently to convert documents to highlight technical languages as well.
Translation memory
Translation memory offers a powerful tool to accelerate the translation process by eliminating the time and effort needed to retranslate the same content every time. There are many firms which are specialized in a particular area of work; translation memory can be an ideal tool for them. They are expandable data basis of software-driven encountered wordings that translates in desired targeted languages. Translation memory reduces time and efforts by standardizing words and phrases.
Terminology management
Law firms have their own lexicon of terminologies, brands and abbreviations. A software glossary can be aggregated to ensure the consistent use of all translations throughout the process of preferences. Glossary preserves the authentic way of communication across all translated documents. A firm’s existing dictionary can also be imported, or a new glossary can be made to represent the way of communicating adequately. Terminology management glossaries can be integrated with translation software as well.
Legal PEMT
The process of humans amending machine-generated translations to get an acceptable outcome is called Post Editing Machine Translation (PEMT). In law firms and legal sectors, PEMT is considered as more crucial. The reason behind the conflict is that the legal industry relies more on experts to operate as they have years of experience. While there is a concern raised by linguists that utilizing PEMT may leave unnecessary work for translators in the current state.
The current level of technology
In 2017, a contest by the name of Man vs. Machine was organized between humans and robots. The task was given to translate documents in different languages. Human translators triumphed and rejoiced! 25 out of 30 was the average score of the participants while Google AI software scored between 10 to 15 as there was a problem identified was just the context in which they were not made it connect the dots well.s
Wrap up
Instead of consulting professionals to ensure the translation of evidences quickly with reliability, leveraging the ultimate power of machine translation merging with the skills of human experts is a great way to reduce time and cost by increasing efficiency. The reason is apparent that today’s available resources are more powerful than ever.
