Litigation & eDiscovery translation
Cross-border disputes produce foreign-language documents by the thousand. We triage the volume with machine translation and put human legal specialists on the documents that matter.
The eDiscovery volume problem
Discovery in a cross-border dispute does not produce a handful of documents. It produces mailboxes — thousands of emails, chat logs, attachments and internal reports, a large share of them in a language your review team cannot read.
Translating all of it with human specialists would be slow and absurdly expensive. Translating none of it means missing the email that decides the case. The answer is not choosing between machines and humans; it is putting each where it belongs.
Triage with machines, decide with humans
Our litigation workflow runs in two tiers.
- Tier one: machine translation for triage. The full collection is machine-translated so your reviewers can search it, sort it and judge relevance in their own language. The goal at this stage is not polish — it is letting a reviewer decide, quickly, whether a document matters.
- Tier two: human translation of the documents that matter. The documents you will cite, produce, or rely on — key correspondence, exhibits, the contract at the center of the dispute — are translated by legal-specialist linguists, with an independent second review on every file.
This is the recurring rule in everything we do: machines help, humans sign off. In litigation the rule has a budget attached — you pay specialist rates only for the fraction of the collection that carries evidentiary weight, typically a small slice of the whole.
Consistency holds across both tiers. Party names, product names and case-specific terms go into a shared term base, so the human-translated exhibit uses the same terms your reviewers saw in the triage pass.
Confidentiality is not a feature, it is the baseline
Litigation documents are privileged, commercially sensitive, or both. Since 2005 we have handled this class of material under a fixed discipline: every linguist signs a non-disclosure agreement before seeing a single file, access is limited to the team assigned to your matter, and we work under your own NDA and any protective-order terms the case imposes.
If a document is too sensitive even for that, tell us — smaller, named teams can be arranged for specific documents.
Built for court deadlines
Discovery schedules do not move because a translation is late. You get a fixed quote with a delivery date within 24 hours of sending the collection. For the human-translated set, our network of 500+ specialist translators lets us split large document sets across multiple linguists working against the same term base, then pass everything through second review — parallel speed without the inconsistency that usually comes with it.
Where the court requires a particular form — a translator declaration, a locally sworn translation — we tell you what that jurisdiction expects and deliver in that form. Every translated document maps segment by segment to its source, which keeps your exhibit record clean and your opponent’s challenges short.
Frequently asked questions
Do you machine-translate everything in discovery?
No — we machine-translate for triage, so your review team can decide which documents are relevant. The documents you will cite, produce or put in front of a court are then translated by human legal specialists with an independent second review. You pay full translation rates only for the documents that earn it.
How do you protect privileged and confidential material?
Every linguist works under a signed NDA, access is restricted to the assigned team, and file handling follows the security terms your matter requires. We can work under your own confidentiality agreement and protective-order terms.
Can the translations be used in court?
Requirements vary by jurisdiction — some courts want a translator declaration, others a locally sworn translation. Tell us where the matter is filed and we deliver the human translations in the form that court accepts, with segment-by-segment traceability to the source document.
How fast can you turn around a large collection?
Machine translation for triage is a matter of days even for large collections. For the human-translated set, our network of 500+ translators lets us run documents in parallel against one shared term base, so speed does not cost consistency. Every project starts with a fixed quote within 24 hours.