Translations key to global investigations.

• Author: Rosen, Jay
• Position: Ethics Corner

The combination of increased globalization and intensified regulation presents complex risks for contractors doing business internationally. An essential part of a robust global ethics and compliance program will be the localization and translation of the code of conduct, policies, training and so on. The scale and urgency of translation needs can, however, balloon in die event of a multinational investigation.

The complexity of a global investigation involving translation presents a whole new set of challenges, even for companies familiar with the standard protocols employed in investigations, which may include document collection, processing and review. Thousands of documents could be involved. It is critical to leverage both technological and human translation solutions to meet the needs of the case in a cost-effective manner.

Consider a hypothetical multilingual investigation. The contractor has operations in Japan, Brazil, Germany and Estonia. It has engaged a forensics firm to identify custodians and image hard drives as part of the initial collection effort. The audit committee has hired outside counsel to run the investigation and each organization hits die ground running.

But what to do with any non-English language documents in the investigation has not been thought through.

What are the best practices for managing the non-English language portion of this type of case? Many companies consider translation to be something they can handle in-house. They may have a bilingual employee or a global office in a country that speaks the source language. In certain circumstances, these options have some validity, but for a mission critical investigation where accuracy and deadlines are paramount, these are not the best choices.

Multilingual ethics and compliance investigations demand a heightened level of sophistication and execution. For a large volume of non-English language documents and pending deadlines, language filtering solutions will bring order to the chaos while reducing the time and cost involved in discovering documents that are key to die investigation. These solutions are offered by most language solutions providers.

* A language identification tool analyzes a document and reports the language distribution as either an absolute value --English, German, Mixed, or unknown--or can deliver a percentage breakdown such as 5 percent German, 95 percent English. On a document level, this breakdown allows for granular workflows. On a...