IQWEST Launches BabelQwest -- the Most Advanced Document Machine-Translation Service for Litigation

LOS ANGELES, CA--(Marketwire - July 10, 2007) - Today IQWest Information Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of advanced technology for litigation support, announced the availability of BabelQwest, a comprehensive suite of services for the automation of foreign language translations related to the Discovery and eDiscovery process. Designed for litigators, case teams, corporate legal departments or anyone charged with reviewing potential litigation documents of foreign origin, BabelQwest assists them with finding relevant foreign language documents faster in both electronic and paper formats, improving their decision making and reducing their translation costs.

The Need for Foreign Languages translation in Discovery

Foreign language documents needing review during the discovery process is one way globalization impacts litigation decision making and increases case costs. Many law firms are spending more than $.30 a word for certified English translations for these documents. Just one CD of documents translated like this cost a client one million dollars or more just to determine which documents are potentially relevant.

Other firms employ computer programs to translate foreign languages with mixed results. Dictionary-based algorithms often produce nonsensical English translations because the nuances of localized idiomatic expressions are lost.

For litigation, BabelQwest is the only machine-language translation program that uses both dictionaries and an artificial intelligence algorithm that was trained by comparing human translated documents against the original text.

The BabelQwest Services Suite focuses on four areas of discovery:

1) Foreign Language Electronic Files and Documents

The BabbleQwest Service Suite translates electronic files and documents into English from Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, as well as from most European languages. BabelQwest can also translate paper documents using a foreign character optical recognition technology to create English translations. In addition, BabelQwest provides tools which assist in the collection and processing of electronically stored information (ESI) from foreign languages.

"Now when a foreign language document has been processed with BabelQwest, you oftentimes would not be able to ascertain that the document wasn't of English language origin," said Bob Gimigliano, Marketing Director of IQWEST Information Technologies, Inc.

2) Foreign Language Paper Files and Documents

In a usual litigation scenario, foreign language documents on paper must be put into a machine readable format for optical character recognition (OCR) before using a machine translation. Based on the preparation for machine language, most OCR programs are ineffective and have a much lower rate of recognition accuracy. BabelQwest OCR increases character recognition accuracy to over 99% which makes paper-based documents machine translatable for the first time.

3) Electronically Stored Information (ESI) of Foreign Origin

With English language based e-mail and other electronically stored information, the discovery process is assisted through the use of culling, indexing, de-duplicating, and extracting metadata of files which are then loaded into a database for review. Now, BabelQwest provides this type of processing for foreign language ESI. IQWEST also coordinates collection services of these data in most countries to increase the speed and efficiency of data collection.

4) Hosting and Review for Litigation Documents that include Foreign Language

Many firms have had bilingual case team-members thwarted during the hosted document review process by software tools that could either not display or search effectively in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, or other languages. In combination with BabelQwest and CaseQwest, foreign language documents are now easily searchable and viewable in our hosted platform so that litigators can review and determine their case relevance.

"By applying our experience in language technology, process and litigation to the discovery market, we believe that IQWest solves the perplexing problems litigators experience when encountering multi-language discovery issues," said Joe Thorpe, CEO of IQWest. "Through this solution, our goal was to give new options to legal teams looking to reduce costs and increase turnaround time for the review process while providing full understanding of foreign language document contents."

The BabelQwest solution is immediately available exclusively at IQWEST. The offering of BabelQwest joins the over twenty (20) products and services hosted by IQWEST. More information about BabelQwest can be found by calling (714) 505-2000 or by sending e-mail to info@iqwestit.com.

About IQWEST

Headquartered in metro Los Angeles, IQWEST is a litigation technology company providing innovative discovery solutions for corporate and law firm counsel. From data collection to document production, IQWEST works with its clients providing professional guidance and support each step of the way. In addition to its headquarters, the company has offices in New York, San Francisco and Irvine. Find out more about IQWEST at www.iqwestit.com.

Contact Information: Press Only: for more information, contact: Valerie Chan PR consultant IQWest Information Technologies, Inc. E-mail: or Phone: 206.856.7885