It’s a small world out there, and it’s only getting smaller. It’s become quite common for regulated U.S.-based businesses to have foreign branches or a range of clients in countries throughout the world. This leads to one increasingly challenging prospect: how can these businesses quickly and cost-effectively manage the eDiscovery process for multi-lingual documents? Here are a few tips to making sure you have the right people, technology and processes on your side.

Selecting the right foreign language support team

This can be a lot more complicated than it sounds. Say the other language you are dealing with is Spanish. You not only need to find a legal support team and translators who speak Spanish, but speak the specific dialect of Spanish in which the documents or emails are written, and have fairly strong familiarity with the subject matter. This is important because there are many Spanish abbreviations and colloquialisms that have subtle differences in their use of words and phrases. Different terms mean different things depending on the context. For example, the acronym CD can mean ‘compact disc’ to someone talking about audio books in education, or a ‘certificate of deposit’ in the world of finance.

Where technology can help… and where it can’t

Intuitive keyword searches (Yes!) – If you find yourself in a situation where you’ve got thousands of multi-lingual documents to search through, hopefully you have an email archiving system in place that automatically indexes and has a smart search capability! ArcMail’s Defender document and email archiving technology provides this and supports all of the following languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Categorizing documents (Yes!) – Depending on the number of documents you need to search, it may be best to perform basic searches – using key terms defined by your specialized foreign experts – to help them categorize your documents based on relevance and importance. If cost and timing is restricted, you could also have auto-translations of all the related documents generated at the outset and have an English-speaking team assist with the initial categorization.

Translating important documents (No! Danger, Will Robinson!) – Remember, auto-translation earned the nickname ‘gist translation’ for a reason. It simply can’t give you the accurate translation a human can – especially when you consider the dialect and subject matter factors mentioned above. So, you will need to have these documents carefully translated by an expert.

More tips for managing the process

Get a multi-lingual point person – Having a point person who speaks English and the other language(s) involved will really help you manage the communication process and mitigate any cultural differences between team members. There’s a good chance this person will be the most expensive resource you use, but it will be worth it.

Map out your process in advance – It will save you time, money and complexity to map out your entire step-by-step process in advance and determine what teams and individuals will be involved in each step. (i.e. locating all documents, categorizing them, translating them).

Leverage technology and non-attorneys where possible – The people resources you use (and the attorneys, in particular) will be the most expensive part of the process, so utilize technology and non-attorney review teams where possible.

To learn more about ArcMail’s content and email archiving solutions, please visit our website today.