Global businesses speak many languages. Conducting business in multiple languages creates business opportunities and business risks as some of the most egregious compliance issues become much harder to detect when employees write in a language other than English. If you do not want to miss critical documents during internal investigations, it is important to get the multilingual keyword searches right. A literal translation of keywords is often ineffective. Here are examples of multilingual keyword search challenges that are particularly surprising.
1. How to spell foreign first names and place names in English
When speakers of languages with a non-Latin script (Asian languages, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, etc.) write emails in their native tongue, they might render place names and first names in different ways when they write in English. When searching documents, we would therefore need to be conscious of different ways to spell names where the original language uses non-Latin script.
