Legal Translations of eDiscovery Documents
As the legal world becomes increasingly global it is becoming more and more common to see foreign language documents being entered as evidence during litigation. Foreign language documents, due to their language and nuances, raise specific challenges for today’s attorneys. In fact, foreign language e-discovery has become so prevalent that, in 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to make it clear that electronic documents – including foreign language ones – were discoverable.
But the issue of foreign language and ediscovery goes well beyond having to get a foreign language translations of the documents, it also takes on a technical challenge. For example, in the US most documents use ASCII formatting for text. However, this system is not a prevalent for such foreign languages as Hebrew or many of the Asian languages. The result is that often times an attorney has to first get a technical foreign language translation of a document and then an actual foreign language translation of the content.
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