Automatic Translation of Court Judgments
Fabrizio Gotti, Guy Lapalme, Elliott Macklovitch, Atefeh Farzindar · 2008
This document presents an experiment in the automatic translation of Canadian Court judgments from English to French and from French to English. We show that although the language used in this type of legal text is complex and specialized, an SMT system can produce intelligible and useful translations, provided that the system can be trained on a vast amount of legal text. We also describe the results of a human evaluation of the output of the system. 1 Context of the work NLP Technologies 1 is an innovative enterprise devoted to the use of advanced information technologies in the judicial domain. Its main focus is the DecisionExpress ™ automatic summarization technology of legal information (Farzindar et al., 2004, Chieze et al. 2008). During the last year, a feasibility study was performed in collaboration with researchers from the RALI 2 at Université de Montréal to determine to what extent judgments from the Canadian Federal Courts could be automatically translated. As it happens, about 50 new judgments are produced weekly; 80 % of which are originally written in English, and 20%, in French. By law, the Federal Courts have to provide a trans-