Your new database offers fast, secure language translations
Now you can securely translate and review foreign language documents directly within the DISCO Ediscovery platform. The translated text remains contained within the translated text pane, ensuring confidentiality and easy access. This translated content is available to all members of the case team, facilitating seamless collaboration and shared understanding.
These translations significantly enhance attorney workflows by providing real-time, on-demand translations of foreign language documents right in the viewer, displayed alongside the original text for easy comparison. This capability accelerates the document review process, reduces associated costs, and delivers timely, critical insights that are essential for developing a strong and effective legal strategy.
This feature is in Run.
How to enable translations for your review team
- As a database administrator for your matter navigate to the Review Team page
- Click the 'Roles' tab
- Locate the ‘Document Viewer’ section of Feature Permissions and enable Translations for the roles on your team (default off).
- Note that default roles (admin, reviewer, restricted reviewer) are uneditable.
- To change the reviewer role, copy it by clicking the "Copy this role" button at the top right.
- After copying, change the default "View" permission for translations to "Manage".
- Update your reviewers to use the new custom role.
- You can change permissions to 'view' or 'manage'
View: Reviewers can view and read document translations
Manage: Reviewers can initiate translations
Worth noting: All documents over 100,000 characters must be handled separately via DISCO professional services.
-
When creating review stages, enable translations by selecting the option during stage configuration.
How to use translations as a document reviewer
- Locate a foreign language document of interest to you in DISCO search
- Open up the foreign language document in the DISCO document viewer
- Notice the 'Translate' icon in the side panel:
- Click 'Translate' icon to open up the Translations panel
Use the drop-down menus to select the language for translation. DISCO translations usually detect the source document's language automatically.
Select your language from the drop-down menu.
-
Click 'Translate' to start the translation. You may briefly see a loading animation before your document is ready.
-
You can start new translations for this document without losing existing ones. Your current translations remain in the translations panel.
The example shows three separate translation operations performed and retained in this document.
FAQ
Q: How does the system handle documents containing multiple languages?
A: The translation engine identifies the document's dominant language. If the document contains significant portions of multiple languages, the "Manage" user may need to select the secondary source language manually to ensure accurate conversion of those sections.
Q: Will the translation preserve the original formatting and layout of the document?
A: The translation panel provides a text-based translation for content review. It does not produce a "near-native" formatted version (such as a PDF with translated text in original positions). For layout-critical reviews, users should use the translation alongside the original image or native view.
Q: How does the 100,000-character limit apply to Excel spreadsheets or large tables?
A: The character limit includes all extracted text in the document.
Q: Is there a cost associated with using the in-app translation feature?
A: No additional cost.
Q: What happens to existing translations if a document is re-processed or overlaid?
A: If a document is re-processed or its extracted text updated via overlay, existing in-app translations may detach or become invalid because the source text changed. In these cases, a new translation must be triggered to ensure accuracy.
Q: Can I filter or search for all documents already translated?
A: DISCO does not currently offer a standard search syntax to identify documents with an "In-App Translation" property. Reviewers should apply a specific tag (e.g., "Translated - Internal") when triggering the translation to track these.
Q: Does the translation tool support Right-to-Left (RTL) languages like Arabic or Hebrew?
A: Yes. The translation panel supports RTL text direction. When translating to or from an RTL language, the viewer adjusts text alignment for readability.
Q: How accurate is the machine translation for technical or legal jargon?
A: The tool uses general-purpose enterprise translation engines. While effective for gist and general context, it may struggle with specialized legal terms or archaic dialects. Use it as a triage tool to decide if a certified professional translation is needed.
Q: What languages are supported?
A:
- Afrikaans
- Albanian
- Amharic
- Arabic
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Bengali
- Bosnian
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dari
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Farsi (Persian)
- Filipino, Tagalog
- Finnish
- French
- French (Canada)
- Georgian
- German
- Greek
- Gujarati
- Haitian Creole
- Hausa
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Irish
- Italian
- Japanese
- Kannada
- Kazakh
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Macedonian
- Malay
- Malayalam
- Maltese
- Marathi
- Mongolian
- Norwegian (Bokmål)
- Pashto
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Portuguese (Portugal)
- Punjabi
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Sinhala
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Somali
- Spanish
- Spanish (Mexico)
- Swahili
- Swedish
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Uzbek
- Vietnamese
- Welsh