During the discovery procedure, the parties can obtain some evidence from the other party(ies) or non-parties. In the situation that interests me, one of the parties has evidence that is in a language that is not common to the other party or the court officials. How does the process work in this case?
Conditions:
both parties are corporations within the court jurisdiction (say two US companies).
the requested evidence is internal communications (say e-mails) within one of the parties, which was performed in a foreign language (foreign in layman terms, say Swedish or Armenian when generally the company operates in English).
assume that the desired evidence would be possible to be obtained using a reasonably broad request if e-mails were written in English. For example:
request any emails related to the patent infringement for "abracadabra" technology
"abracadabra" is the English name of the technology, while it is "hocus pocus" in the language used within communications.
What interests me, is if the company that will be fulfilling the "abracadabra" request is able to not provide "hocus pocus" emails (internally — or later in the litigation, if the truth is uncovered — justifying it that the team fulfilling the request does not speak the language and was unaware of the existence of these communications in a foreign language)? Are there legal mechanisms that prevent such defense using "foreign language"?
Tagged: US and Canada, as I would be interested to learn the practice in any of those two countries.