As the head of TransPerfect Legal Solutions’ multi-language e-discovery practice, I oversee hundreds of non-English matters and migrate dozens more for remediation. Search terms in non-English matters are the number one area we see opposing counsel/vendors missing the mark, often by wide margins. Why is that?

Let’s start with what mistranslated terms are and how they end up “wrong.” Poorly translated terms go wrong in two opposite directions: firstly by under-identifying the number of intended documents and secondly (no less significantly) by promoting large numbers of unrelated documents into the review pool with all the attendant review costs.