Identifying, collecting, processing and searching in foreign languages have been major shortcomings in most commercial off-the-shelf e-discovery platforms and review tools until very recently. While several platforms have finally made the switch to support multiple languages, a number of tools in the e-discovery technician’s arsenal are still either completely ignorant of character encoding issues or provide only limited support.
Having such weak links in the e-discovery workflow, it is not uncommon to run into documents in an electronic production filled with dreaded question marks or boxes instead of foreign language symbols. Consequently, having a deep understanding of Unicode and character encodings remains to be critical in order to handle electronic documents accurately.