In Europe, anywhere from 40% to 60% of all Documents collected will be in a language other than English, even in large multinational corporations with a policy of using English as the official corporate language.
Since very few American attorney's have sufficient command of French, German or Dutch to be able to adequately analyse and evaluate the significance of documents written in these languages, Translating these documents in summary or full text form is usually indispensable. Even when the Attorney is fluent, a full text translation will need to be made of any document to be used as evidence before the judge and jury.
Considering the cost of full text translations (about US$ 50.00 per page), a method for reducing the number of documents to be translated is essential. One such method is creating a searchable Database. When the number of non-English documents is large, the cost of its creation is easily justified. In addition to the four corner indexing created in the Coding process, European lawyers and paralegals can be employed to add brief English language summaries to the Database thereby giving the American attorneys an insight into the legal significance of each document and providing a basis for the translation decision. By keeping the English summaries available in the Database, the decision not to translate a given document can be continuously reviewed in light of subsequent developments in the case.
Another alternative is automatic translation of documents which have gone through the Scanning and OCR process. The programmes used for automatic translation are constantly being improved, but work best on professionally prepared, carefully edited documents and least well on the reports, memoranda, general correspondence and internal memoranda (often hand written) that contain the most useful information for the attorneys.