Case Study  ·  Regulatory & Compliance

98% Domain-Accurate Translation Across 12 Languages for a Multinational Compliance Operation

The Challenge

A multinational financial services group operating across twelve EU jurisdictions needed to translate regulatory communications, compliance documentation, and customer-facing materials into twelve languages — simultaneously and accurately. The compliance and legal terms involved were highly specialised, and errors in translation had direct regulatory risk implications.

Generic machine translation tools produced output that was linguistically correct but domain-inaccurate — mistranslating regulatory terminology, conflating legal concepts that differ between jurisdictions, and producing outputs that required near-complete rewriting by human translators before they could be used. The translation workflow was a bottleneck, adding days to regulatory response timelines.

The Approach

Almanor AI's forward-deployed team worked alongside the client's compliance and legal translation teams for six weeks, building a domain-specific translation corpus from five years of previously translated regulatory documentation. This corpus — covering over 120,000 document pairs across twelve language combinations — was used to fine-tune translation models for each language pair.

Crucially, the models were trained not just on surface translation quality but on domain accuracy — the correct rendering of jurisdiction-specific regulatory terms, legal concepts, and compliance obligations in each target language. Human reviewer feedback was captured systematically and fed back into model training via the Almanor Data Engine.

A human review workflow was designed in parallel, routing outputs below a confidence threshold to specialist reviewers and feeding their corrections back into the training pipeline. This closed loop meant the models improved continuously from day one of deployment.

The Results

After eight weeks of deployment and continuous feedback integration, domain translation accuracy reached 98% across all twelve language pairs — measured against the client's own expert reviewers. Human review time fell by 65%, as reviewers shifted from near-complete rewrites to reviewing and approving accurate draft translations.

Regulatory response timelines were reduced by an average of three working days per communication, directly reducing the risk of regulatory deadline breaches. The compliance team described the system as operating at the level of a specialist in-house translator — with the throughput of an automated system.

Ongoing

The translation system is now handling 100% of first-draft translation for regulatory communications across all twelve jurisdictions. The Data Engine continues to capture reviewer corrections, and models are retrained quarterly. The client has extended the system to cover internal compliance training materials, where the same domain accuracy requirements apply.