Leading law firm – translating a litigation case

A productive partnership with a legal giant

Since 2014, Eging Translation and Interpreting has been working in partnership with a leading law firm. This firm chose to partner with Eging Translation for our expertise in the legal sector, our ability to provide high quality language services round the clock and most importantly, our unrelenting focus on security and confidentiality.

Since the partnership began, Eging Translation has translated a wide range of documents, both into and out of English, for the law firm’s client base.

Be it witness statements, litigation notes, supporting evidence for key trials or even providing interpreters for meetings and court cases, both companies have successfully collaborated on a variety of projects.

The requirement

For one particularly large and high-profile case, the usual challenge of fast, high-quality translation grew to new heights. The files were a mixture of different file types and languages (with some content already in English, mixed amongst the Russian). The majority of the files were non-editable, scanned PDFs which, under normal circumstances, would require translation from scratch without the aid of traditional, cost-saving translation technology, such as a translation memory (TM) or any Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools. Since cost was an important factor in this case, there simply wasn’t the budget or the timeframes to translate in such a manual fashion.

How Eging Translation helped

Eging Translation was able to speed up the translation process and reduce costs for the law firm’s client using our expertise, creativity and innovative technology. Eging Translation’s team developed an innovative optical character reader (OCR) tool which was able to analyse the quality of PDFs. By simply dropping batches of files into the tool, Eging Translation was able to identify the language, and provide a word count, as well as assessing the quality of each page.

With this innovative technology, both the editable and un-editable text was picked up for translation, and the tool was able to score the quality of the OCR output to determine its usability.

This resulted in greater leverage of the TM, as more text became usable and therefore could be analysed by the CAT tool. Put simply, the law firm was able to secure significant cost and time savings on behalf of their client.

Eging Translation also applied some unique file processing to pass on additional cost and time savings to the client. A workflow was established whereby only unique content for translation could be identified, and any repeated segments were processed using translation memory. This second stage of the process more than halved the number of translatable words from 1.1 to 0.4 million.

Due to the urgency, and with a standard turnaround time of 7-8 months, multiple linguists with the correct expertise and skillsets

were then deployed and thoroughly briefed to translate the documents simultaneously.  Independent proofreading was also carried out in parallel, which enabled Eging Translation to further accelerate the turnaround time of this urgent project and guarantee the quality.

Spot quality assurance (QA) checks were then carried out on some of the documents by a third linguist, and then all files underwent a final pre-delivery QA check by Eging Translation’s Project Managers to act as a safety net to manage quality risk and consistency.

Some files also went through a round of desktop publishing to ensure the formatting mirrored the original Russian documents – a challenge in itself when Russian text is usually 30% longer than English.

Finally, through certificate bundling, Eging Translation was able to further reduce turnaround times. Rather than certifying each page or document individually (which would take considerable time), the batch of files was certified as a whole; a solution which met court requirements and also helped to further reduce costs, as only 1 certificate was charged for 1.1 million words.

The result

Through innovative technology, careful planning and close collaboration, Eging Translation and this leading law firm were able to complete Batch 1 of the case to a high-quality standard, within an accelerated turnaround time of just 30 working days.

Cost savings amounted to 86% when compared to the cost of translating each document word for word by standard translation methods.

A further 10 batches of files have since been completed for the case, bringing the total translated word count to 1,201,972 words with more still to come.