The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/163881
Your Computer Is Your Translator by Jasmine Pui In contests to attract and retain high-value business, there is no reason to lose out more than you should due to a mere difference in language. When a company decides to build a factory in Moldova or the United States, it selects a law firm that can best enable its success. Communication activities, not just legal expertise, are essential to your firm's competitiveness. In the quest for multinational clients, law firms sometimes overlook latent advantages they can offer their clients by introducing or enhancing three-way communication with translation on demand. The benefits are frequently subtle and noticeable only over the long term as you build relationships with clients. Voice Translations Simultaneous voice translation to and from another language can help adapt your services to your foreign client's current strategy. Scheduling meetings with skilled human translators used to be the norm, but more legal decisions and activities have become mobile, and the pace of meetings has picked up. It has become financially feasible to consider real-time online translation options such as Jibbigo, Siri, Nuance and Nina. The best options require training to recognize senones, instead of just phonemes. Phonemes are the most basic constituent sounds, and senones are sequential triplets of phonemes, so larger vocabularies, contexts and natural speech are recognized. Full conversations are possible as long as everyone speaks consecutively and not on top of each other. Better natural speech recognition is only the first part of realtime translation. Advances in neural networks and cloud computing have made machine learning much faster. Just as important as converting idioms and concepts into foreign sentences are the basics of proper grammatical word order. If attempting to compare a common law jurisdiction with a civil law one, legalese combined with different grammatical rules still produce some awkward or embarrassingly inaccurate translations. 52 Peer to Peer Written Translations For translation software that will generate the most value out of written communication, Google Translate is trained with a large body of human-translated text originating from the United Nations and the European Union. Since these include plenty of legalese, this popular option may be better than Microsoft's offering to reflect everyday language. Google Translate and Bing Translator rely on gisting, so general ideas being conveyed are understandable and actionable. Translation companies that previously relied on human translators are increasing their reliance on machine translation. Lionbridge's GeoFluent relies on Microsoft Translator and Microsoft Translator Hub for translation work before refugee claim tribunals, professional service online chat sessions and forum discussions. The Microsoft Translator application programming interface (API) draws from existing translated sentences to create translations in realtime. The Hub recalls past specific data and translates contextual content for higher levels of accuracy. These options are scalable and can be integrated into existing software compared to human translator support. Translate with Caution Microsoft Office cautions that their Translate feature in Word or Outlook "is helpful for conveying the basic subject matter of the content and for confirming whether the content is relevant to you. For important or sensitive files, human translation is recommended, because machine translation might not preserve the full meaning and tone of the text." However, invoking customized APIs for your law firm or training users on how to make Siri accessible during client calls might provide a huge ROI.