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A Primer on Foreign Language e-Discovery

By Ari Kaplan
While e-discovery may be Greek to many, it is those documents written in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian that cause much of the trouble. These 'multi-byte' languages have exponentially more characters than the 26 letters and few other punctuation marks that Latin languages like English, Spanish, French and German need. In fact, the number of Chinese characters included in the Kangxi dictionary is over 47,000 (though only 3,000-4,000 are reportedly necessary for full literacy). The impact on e-discovery is significant considering the increased sophistication necessary for case evaluation.

At the most basic level, computers think in ones and zeros, with a one or zero being a bit. Eight bits is a byte. There are 256 different combinations of numbers you can create using a byte (2 (bits) to the eighth power). For languages that are not based solely on letters, i.e., those where symbols represent a concept or a syllable, you need to add bytes (256 x 256, which equals 66,536). That is the essence of multi-byte vs. single-byte languages ' single-byte languages have 256 possible combinations, while multi-byte languages have 66,536.

Confused? Then let's address codings. An encoding is a programmatical translation of what you input to what you get on the screen. The problem is when you have multiple encodings. For example, when analyzing an Outlook 2000 e-mail file (PST format) under a Japanese operating system that you then convert to an English-language machine for review, there will be problems because the native data in Japanese is corrupted due to linguistic differences.

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