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Platform Story: Linguistic Systems, Inc.

Shana Kirchner

Several members of our advice@kCura team are experts in custom development, helping our partners and clients build applications and integrations to extend Relativity’s functionality. To highlight some of the unique ways our users are taking advantage of the platform, we interviewed a few of our partners and clients who have worked with custom development to help create some more complex applications.

We sat down with Mark Ettinger, the vice president of business development at Linguistic Systems, Inc. In addition to delivering language translation services to more than half of the Fortune 500 companies, Linguistic Systems has developed a patent-pending secure SaaS solution, Select Translation Service (STS), that provides five levels of translation service to address the varying special needs involved in translating e-discovery documents.

The Linguistic Systems Translation Plug-in (LTP) for Relativity is a bridge between Relativity and STS that was developed specifically to provide Relativity users with seamless access to the unique translation services of STS.

kCura: Tell us a little about the Linguistic Systems Translation Plug-in for Relativity (LTP).

Mark Ettinger: LTP is a free translation plug-in for Relativity that allows law firms, corporations, or e-discovery companies to choose among five levels of translation adequacy: machine translation (MT) that uses proprietary secure computer translation engines; light human post editing of the MT; full human post editing of the MT; human translation (without using the MT); and human translation with editing by a second human translator to eliminate possible human errors. This integration is a perfect fit for the high volume application of e-discovery because it offers an ability to optimize the balance among accuracy, speed, and cost to suit the user’s needs.

The beautiful thing about LTP is that it takes the translation result and puts it right back into Relativity next to the extracted text, allowing users to then toggle between the original extracted text and the translated text. Another important aspect of this integration is that users can download the plug-in for free and can keep it on their system for free. It’s a pay-for-service-only model.

Finally, our system is highly secure. All communications with STS are encrypted, and the security is regularly checked for vulnerability by third-party companies specializing in security testing. Only authorized personnel have access to the documents for the human component of STS, and the MT is performed without any human involvement at all. More than that, all machine-translated documents are removed from STS servers upon delivery unless otherwise requested by the client.

Can you tell me a little bit about automatic versus human assistance with translation in Relativity?

We use state-of-the-art MT engines that can be customized to the matter’s subject domain or augmented with the user’s dictionary. But even that doesn’t provide quality comparable to human translation because the computer science is not there yet. MT quality is very limited, but it is very useful for determining document relevancy. Since it is so inexpensive, the user can save considerable time and money by using MT to avoid human translation of irrelevant documents.

For responsive documents, MT can be greatly improved by human post editing. The user can decide what level of editing should be applied according to the importance of the document. The most important documents, particularly those submitted to the court, should be translated entirely by human translation to ensure the best composition and style.

What kinds of feedback have you received from customers?

Our clients are pretty excited about it. It doesn’t cost them anything to get the plug-in, and it’s a great benefit because the translation goes right back into their Relativity environment. They don’t need to spend time and effort exporting the foreign documents, and savings are especially true for importing the translations and connecting them to the source document. They just click a button, select the desired translation service, and get the translation back in Relativity.

What are your future plans for the app?

We’re really listening to our customers to constantly improve the LTP usability. We’re improving the quality of our proprietary MT engines and adding more language pairs, currently at 57. We won’t release an engine for use until its quality meets or exceeds the measured rating of the corresponding Google engine. We’re also keeping abreast of Relativity’s new releases so that users on a new release don’t have to wait for our update.


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