The role of machine translation in the legal sector By Alan White, Business Development Director at The Translation People recently used its own automatic translation technology to launch its first ecommerce site in Sweden, it hit the headlines when the translations outputted were lewd and vulgar in nature, bringing attention to the launch for all the wrong reasons4. In reality, machine translation technology only comes into its own – providing the most accurate and effective translations – when delivered as a hybrid solution together with skilled language and translation professionals with a specialism in the legal sector.
Whether a barrister is working on a criminal, civil or commercial case, machine translation is going to become a routine part of every day.
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hether dealing with business owners with enterprises overseas, receiving evidence from non-English speakers or simply trying to manage large volumes of legal documents as efficiently as possible, reliance on translation services across the legal industry is rising. However, given that even the most inconspicuous of inaccuracies in court documents can lead to delays in hearings or the undermining of evidence once discovered, there’s a real and definite need to utilise translation services which offer the highest levels of precision possible. Machine translation is growing in popularity in legal sectors around the world, but how useful is this technology for the industry in practice? At its core, machine translation offers significant time and cost saving efficiencies for those managing large volumes of multilingual documents, which can be incredibly useful for those dealing with international cases. For legal firms that have an international footprint of their own, using machine translation to convert masses of legal documents into various languages quickly and easily enables them to focus on the key priority – achieving justice for their clients. Enquiries into and uptake in machine
technology are surging. Online searches for ‘machine translation’ have increased 16 per cent in the last five years, while its related search term ‘machine learning’ has increased 135 per cent1. Over the last six years, UK-based translation provider The Translation People has experienced a 2,016 per cent increase in the volume of work it carried out with machine translation, while website enquiries for this service increased 1,130 per cent. Accurate and efficient processes within the legal sector require a deep understanding of legal translation and terminology issues across different countries and thanks to state-of-theart machine translation technology now available, it is possible for translation providers to play a key role in streamlining the ways in which barristers work both in court and out of it. However, some barristers will consider machine translation with trepidation following several recent high profile examples of basic machine translation technology not being put to best use. For example, a thread of tweets about Google Translate’s capabilities recently went viral and saw them accused of making sexist assumptions about gender neutral language2. There’s also been a study3 that suggests free translation tools contribute to significant misunderstandings of legal terms with conflicting meanings for some words. Meanwhile, after Amazon
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Machine translation centres on processing input and producing output. Words, sentence structure, subject and grammatical information are all analysed, before being translated into the desired language. However, the accuracy of the output is determined in large part by the size of the language database sitting behind the machine. The more bilingual material fed into the engine by base engineers, the better the result will be, whilst the quality of the output is also determined by the nature of the text, as some content types work better than others. Direct and straightforward language – such as that found in instructions and user manuals – is well suited to machine translation with less input needed from linguists; emotive copy or complex language, such as that we see in legal documents, requires greater support from specialist, legal posteditors to achieve optimum results. Within the legal field, customised machine translation engines should be developed for clients on an individual basis, with a legal language expert assigned to train the engine over time. This way of working enables the machine to achieve a greater understanding of legal terminology and language. If any element of a translation is incorrect, it’s spotted and edited by the translator. These edits can be used over time to train the machine not to make the same mistake again in the future, driving a continuous improvement in its output, achieving a more efficient process and greater accuracy in output. Where large volumes of documents are received in a different language, raw machine translation can be used to create a first draft of the translation to determine which documents may be needed as a priority. Those which require greater input from a human translator will then receive a full post-edit, to achieve 100% accuracy in output for the client. Machine translation must be carefully
