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Following on from yesterday’s musings on the utility of technological tools for legal translation purposes, let’s hear today what a lecturer in family law has to say about the topic:

“Regarding … improving family experiences, numerous AI-based tools are designed to support clients or lawyers, but their accuracy strongly depends on the case details.

No doubt automatised legal translators [sic] have rapidly pro­gressed in the last few years, yet their accuracy compared to the sworn translator can still be questioned. …

Yet, they tend to fall short in complicated matters, particularly highly contextual sentenc­es.

Additionally, as a scholar deeply immersed in Japanese family law, I can assess that the existing translators [sic] can mislead about the true sense of the content of the legal norms or documents and, thus, can be treated only as a support tool. …

Family law requires an exact understanding of the analysed text, including legal terms and human emotions that can be expressed in various ways, such as non-verbal messages. …

Given the noticeable number of international couples communicating with each other or their children in different languages, detailed knowledge about the family and personal situation cannot depend on auto­matic translation, which cannot grasp the significance of words and non-verbal mes­sages at this stage.

Conversely, clients seeking legal information through automated translations could find incomplete or false information.

Thus, despite the rapid pace of development of AI-based legal translations, family lawyers should consider em­ploying reasoning based on them as high-risk assumptions, mainly due to the ina­bility to grasp subtleties and cultural nuances.

This raises an essential question – is AI-based translation useful at all if a specialised human translator will probably al­ways be more accurate than machines and one step ahead, despite the slower work?”

Piegzik, M.A., “The Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Family Law –
Brand New or Well-known Idea?” Folia Iuridica Universitatis Wratislaviensis
2024 vol. 13 (2), 26–51

I’d argue these considerations do not apply just to family law but to all branches of law.

The language of the law is hard. Translating the language of the law is hard.

It still confounds technology. There are no simple push-of-a-button solutions.

If you need help seeing through the hype and want someone to tell you the truth about what language technologies can and cannot do when it comes to translating legal documents from Greek to English and vice versa, book a 30-minute call here: https://lnkd.in/edMThP3c

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