The number of people in the United States who speak a language other than English has dramatically increased in recent years. Practitioners in America are likely to feel the effects of this growing linguistic diversity during discovery when they encounter documents in a language other than English. The modern‐day practitioner faces a curious ethical dilemma: given the advances in neural machine translation (NMT) technology, is it in their client’s best interest to forego hiring a costly—yet accurate—human translator and instead rely on a faster, cheaper software program that will produce an imperfect—but in most cases sufficient—English translation? When an automated program incorrectly translates a key phrase in a document and the client’s case is negatively impacted, can the practitioner who relied on machine translation technology be held liable in a subsequent malpractice suit?
There is a paucity of legal guidance in the field of written translation. A startling lack of both state and federal regulations leaves the practitioner without much guidance about how to best protect both their clients’ interests and their own. This article explores the history of and recent advances in machine translation as well as potential liability issues which may arise when a lawyer uses machine translation technology to translate client documents into English. This article argues in favor of regulating written translation in a similar manner as oral interpretation and encourages practitioners to employ a hybrid method of document translation which consists of an initial machine translation and subsequent review by a human translator.