Yeah no, this is such a silly take on the situation. Finding anything useful in literally millions of pages of arbitrary documents, when you don't even know if there is anything useful, is an amazing feat. "Just" hiring a translator could also be prohibitively expensive at this volume when your company is already on the verge of bankruptcy. Even running a regular text search across millions of pages of what was probably a mix of emails, word documents, pdfs, etc takes a while today, never mind in the early 2000s. Keep in mind that this was probably an intern on what was a regular computer at the time, not some fancy distributed compute cluster. Finding anything useful in that pile is a gargantuan feat, even if there was no language barrier.

I don't think it's a feat, so much as copious amounts of luck (unless this intern is secretly a world champion speed reader).