Almost 7,000 different languages are spoken across the globe. One language, however, is spoken by only few people and hardly anyone else understands it: legal language. This language is extremely complex and elaborate and is generally used to write contracts, in order to confuse and deceive people. It is a common situation for the consumer to speak to a lawyer before signing a contract. It is even more common for some people to sign contracts or to accept the terms and conditions of use of digital platforms without really understanding what is written. Our goal with Contract Translator is to enable anyone, even the most unexperienced layperson, to be able to fully understand each clause in the contract they are signing.

Legal language is a very dangerous language for the consumer. As few people speak it, it is often used in contracts to hide clauses that favor the company rather than the customer. Due to that challenge, Reclame Aqui created Contract Translator, a very simple application, which translates the legal language into language that anyone can understand. The tool works by taking a picture of the contract, writing a snippet of it, or uploading the file. After a few moments, the consumer gets the contract translated and set into one of three categories: secure, inaccurate or unsafe. That way consumers can protect themselves from a negotiation that could bring them problems in the future.

For Contract Translator to work well on every contract / terms and conditions of use of online platforms it was necessary to gather a lot of information. The tool's data has more than 800,000 complex sentences / 600,000 contracts / 8,000 legal terms / other 950,000 phrases written in colloquial language. All this information is crossed by an artificial intelligence that analyzes the complicated clauses of a contract, searches the application data for a solution that does not change the meaning of the opening sentence, and finally translates the legal language into colloquial language. As AI improves itself every time people use it, the Contract Translator was initially launched for the 800,000 consumers who had made complaints about harmful or malicious contracts on the site Reclame Aqui. After weeks of use, the tool was finally released to the public at the world's largest application stores.

The Contract Translator is a combination of several types of expertise: lawyers, programmers, UX designers and linguists. A team of 15 people working exclusively to create a tool that identifies legal terms and sentences that are either complicated or written in a way to deceive the consumer. In the database of the application / website, over 100,000 contracts were input, containing 800,000 complicated written sentences, 8,000 legal terms and another 1 million sentences in colloquial language. Based on concepts of probability, the tool identifies a word or term and ‘translates’ it in that context, suggesting how it must be transformed in order to simplify its understanding without changing its meaning. The work was conducted by BL & MM Analytics & Research under the coordination of Data Scientist Fabio Meletti de Oliveira Barros with the support of the research team of Prof. José Afonso Mazzon from FEA / USP, the largest university of technology in Latin America.

Already on the launch date, Reclame Aqui took advantage of the high rate of engagement and reliability of its users to launch the tool to the 800 thousand consumers who have filed complaints about contracts in the last year. The response was overwhelming, with more than half of its users testing and sending feeback on the tool, either with the mobile app or the desktop website. Contract Translator has empowered people to understand a language they have contact with at various times in their lives, whether it is time to buy a product, accept the terms and conditions of an online platform, rent or buy a property, and even sign a marriage contract. With the tool in hand, people have more than just data set; they have the power of information anytime they need it.