The language of law

In an increasingly integrated global community, with cross-border disputes ever more frequent, the issue of language grows more complex. Documents created in any country and any language can be, and increasingly are, relevant to lawsuits, investigations or regulatory matters. Consequently, legal teams need to be aware of how to equip themselves for the challenge of dealing with multilingual forms of evidence.

A technical minefield

The technical processes in cross-border electronic disclosure are sophisticated, often invoking in-depth analyses of data storage issues. Fundamentally, computers hold data in encoded formats which are alien to most human users. One issue to consider therefore is how such encoding is handled by various types of computer system: does the system decipher or distort the codes which are being used to determine and accurately represent the languages contained in any given document?

There are currently two main methods used in the successful handling of multilingual data—code pages and Unicode. A code page is a cross reference table that translates