As cross-border litigation and regulatory investigations become increasingly common, document review professionals and providers are frequently tasked with reviewing documents spanning multiple languages.
The Challenge
Global organizations are generating data across continents and communication platforms. Cross-border litigation is on the rise, and regulators are increasingly taking an international rather than domestic view. As a result, disputes and investigations frequently involve the collection, review and production of data generated in multiple jurisdictions and languages. Without the right tools and workflows this can add a further layer of cost, time and complexity to the eDiscovery process.
The prospect of multilingual disclosure can be daunting, but with the availability of language detection tools and machine translation, it is becoming more manageable. However, while these tools offer speed and scalability, human validation remains critical to ensure accuracy, context, and legal defensibility.
The Role of Technology in Multi-language Review
Modern translation and language identification technologies have evolved significantly thanks to advancements in AI and natural language processing, including eDiscovery technology tools. Many offer functionality that can detect primary and secondary languages across data sets, and the percentages of each language by document. Machine translation is now capable of delivering clear and coherent translations that provide valuable insight into document content. It is particularly effective for early-stage / early case assessment (ECA) review, allowing teams to quickly assess relevance, prioritise documents, and streamline triage workflows.
Human Validation Still Matters
Even with recent advancements and improvements, automated language detection and translation is not a substitute for human interpretation and review, especially in high-risk scenarios like litigation, regulatory review or privilege assessments. Translation tools can misinterpret legal terminology, cultural nuances, or industry-specific jargon and inaccurate translations may lead to missed issues or misclassification of documents, all of which can have serious consequences.
Human reviewers, fluent in the relevant languages, play a critical role in validating automated machine output, especially for key documents or those marked as potentially privileged or highly relevant. They ensure that the nuances of language, tone, and context are correctly understood and that any ambiguities are resolved.
Best Practice: A Hybrid Approach
The most effective approach to multilingual review in eDiscovery combines the speed and efficiency that technology can deliver with human oversight.
Here are a few best practices:
Language Identification: Use technology to identify the languages present in the dataset early on to inform staffing decisions and workflow design.
Strategic Translation: Avoid translating everything by using machine translation for low-risk documents and prioritise human translation or review for documents more likely to be relevant and those central to case strategy.
Leverage Bilingual Reviewers: Where possible, assign native or fluent speakers to key parts of the review to add context and accuracy to document coding decisions.
Document Workflows Clearly: Ensure that your review methodology, including the role of technology and human validation, is documented to support defensibility if challenged.
Monitor and calibrate: Track the effectiveness of your workflows and adjust as needed as continuous feedback between AI output and human reviewers improves results over time.
Advancements in technology have transformed multilingual document review, making it faster and more manageable. However, the value of human insight remains essential. By adopting a hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both, legal teams can ensure accuracy, defensibility, and efficiency in even the most complex multilingual matters.
