| Foreign language support growing – Mais bien sûr |
| Wednesday, 20 July 2011 | |
|
Legal
Process Outsourcing (LPO) service providers have steadily built upon their
existing capabilities and service offerings over the years. A requisite for
growth in any segment or organization once established however, is the need to
widen its scope of offerings. For LPO service providers, it was initially being
able to offer clients a variety of legal services across the value chain. With
time, additional benefits have been offered including on-shore support, proprietary
technology platforms etc. Foreign language support is one such area that has
caught steam in the last couple of years.
LPO
service providers traditionally offered minimal language support initially. Typically,
most of the work was in English owing to initial clients being based out of the
US and the UK. However, as outsourcing of
legal services has gathered momentum and with a growing geographic spread of
clients the need to offer language support became apparent. At the outset
support was offered for major languages such as Spanish, German or French.
However with the progression of time and the maturity of the industry,
languages like Korean, Hebrew, and Chinese, among others have begun to be offered.
This is primarily to provide support to clients headquartered in the US or Europe
with regional offices across the world. With the capability to translate
documents internally, a service provider saves their clients time and resources
needed for translation.
Service
providers have the ability to offer multilingual support through a variety of
methods. The first being partnerships with pure-play translation vendors. In
this case, documents needing translation are sent directly to the vendor and
are then sent back having been translated. The technology head of a leading LPO
service provider stated that this is a preferred method as the level of quality
is far higher than when using software. However, adherence to deadlines on the
part of the translation vendor is sometimes an issue faced with this arrangement.
He also added that technology tools, such as Rosetta, are used in the
translation of documents but provide less acceptable quality metrics than human
intervention. LPO service providers also have in-house lawyers fluent in
multiple languages thereby reducing the need for a reliance on translation
vendors or software. For LPO providers that do not boast this proposition,
external lawyers are hired at times, with the ability to translate documents
needed.
One
thing is certain, with an expanding client base, the majority of which are
organizations with a global presence, LPO service providers can be guaranteed
of multilingual support becoming yet another necessary tool that will further
lead to their growth. As this industry continues to refine so will its methods
and the need to provide bilingual support for document review and contract
management type services. Innovative ways of offering foreign language support will
also be brought to fruition. A combination of technology and human review might
help in increasing the level of quality of the work being translated.
- Vineet Ramachandran, Analyst,
ValueNotes Sourcing Practice
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