Would you certify sewage?

Good afternoon, Mr. Lossner,
   We have received the attached document from a patent attorney. An English translation of it has already been prepared by the attorney's office, but it must be certified. Thus in this case it would be necessary to check it in order to issue the certification.
  Could you please inform us of the cost and time required to certify this translation? The customer has also informed us that there will be further translations in the future, particularly for patents. Thus we would be interested in working together long-term. Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Best regards,

Your Expert Translation Agency

I always get a sinking feeling when the customer thinks he's able to translate a document himself and get me or some other court-sworn translator to rubber-stamp it as "true and correct". Any certification would require a very careful word-for-word review of the translation, comparing it against the source text. Anything else would be unethical. Of course there are colleagues who don't care about such niceties and send stacks of pre-stamped paper to their agency customers for use with God-only-knows-what-translations. On their heads be it. My stamp and signature put my reputation, such as it is, at stake, and I don't see the need to do that in support of work by King Louie & Co.

In twelve years of commercial translation work, I have yet to see a single patent translation submitted to me for review that could pass without heavy editing. Even the best translators can have a bad day, but it seems that the patent translators some of my clients and prospects use never have a good one. I assume that the translator who did this particular piece of work had just had his dog run over by a steam roller.

The first line gave me a bad premonition of things to come. It started out like this:

Huh? A quick look at the original text revealed the monkey's tail:

OK... well, anyone can substitute a word by accident when distracted, but... the rest of the first paragraph wasn't much better. It read a bit like Tarzan's first, painstaking steps with the English language, learning from picture books and guessing at words. The second paragraph continued the tour de farce:

I'll let you, Dear Reader, take a wild guess at that one. A quick scan at the remaining 13 pages showed the same level of expertise in every paragraph my unfortunate eyes glanced upon.

My response to the inquiry was perhaps less patient than it could have been, but the day was rather a hectic one, and if I am to embark on a long-term collaboration with a service broker, I expect this broker to be able to tell liquid manure from drinking water. I figured it was time for a lesson in colloquial American English, so I opened with

No way, José!

(in normal font color and at ordinary size for courtesy) and suggested that a retranslation of the patent might be advisable, as there was not a single sentence I saw worth recycling as text. Alas, I fear the client prefers British colloquialisms or insists on "saving" money with his fine translation skills, for I heard not a further word in response to my proposal.

I feel sorry for the inventor. The poor fellow put his trust in an attorney who surely is not cheap, and said attorney probably charged him a fortune for that dog's breakfast "translation". In this case, it's obvious that machine translation played no role; Google Translate would have offered an improvement of the mess I was given.

These days, it doesn't take a lot of effort to find a qualified translator to translate a text like this. Professional associations like the BDÜ, ITI, SFT and the ATA offer directories of translators and their special skills or qualifications, including those able to prepare sworn translations. Or there's always Google and relevant keywords. Often, the worst thing that can happen is to put your trust in an attorney or other agent who in turn passes the text elsewhere, and from there on further it goes and ends up with a cranky guy like me who is likely to have a stroke trying to patch the holes in that moldy Swiss cheese.

Those who need translations for important purposes should do themselves a favor by hiring a professional to to a professional job. It's almost always cheaper to get it right the first time.

Patently specialized

(Contribution by the mad patent translator, Steve Vitek)

I promised to write a guest blog for Kevin Lossner about translation of patents. What he had in mind was some useful advice for talented people who may be just starting out and who are wondering whether to specialize in patents or try a different field.

I thought it was a good idea, so here it is. I have been translating mostly patents for the last 24 years, so hopefully I have learned something useful about patent translation in all that time. I mostly translate Japanese patents as I am by training what they call in Europe a "Japanologist" (MS Word spell checker flagged the word), since I received my degree in Japanese studies from the Charles University in Prague. I mostly work directly for patent law firms who send me mostly Japanese patents and German patents, but also some in French and other languages. In addition to patents, I translate all kinds of documents as well, such as personal documents and legal briefs, documents for antitrust litigation, etc.

Some people may think that if they have a degree in liberal arts, they should not even attempt to translate patents. This is true to some extent - if you never enjoyed for instance your high school classes in physics or chemistry or other sciences, maybe you should stay away from patents. It's not that you cannot translate them because you don't like sciences, you probably still could do that, but would you really want to spend the rest of your life doing something that you don't enjoy?
The so-called "patent translation field" is not really a field because the subject is just too broad.
Patents are issued for anything and everything. Huge machines such as cranes or nuclear reactors, or sexy bra designs (which is really about mechanical engineering, geometry and some chemistry) and new age jewelry to be placed strategically on a short skirt - these are just some topics that I have been and you may be dealing with as a patent translator. Patent applications have been written about software, hardware, soup extracts, methods for growing mushrooms or cheese in your basement. I have not seen a patent for growing marihuana yet, but if they legalize it, the chances are that I will be translating it from some language if I live that long. You don't have to translate all patents in all fields, you can choose to stay away from some fields, such as medical devices or pharmaceuticals, or you can specialize mostly in patents dealing with medical devices and pharmaceuticals.

Although we generally cannot call the patent agent or inventor who wrote a patent application and ask them questions about the text, the advantage of patents is that we can find context easily for just about any patent, for example on the European Patent Office, or the Japan Patent Office or French Patent Office website and other websites. The American Translators Association published a few years ago the Second Edition of The Patent Translator's Handbook which should be still available from them for about 50 dollars. If it is sold out, you can read my chapter in it called "Internet Resource for the Translation of Patents Into English" for free on my blog. I also have other blogs dedicated to patent translation, such as a description of my experience with machine translation of patents from Japanese, or a test of the Google Translate function, which I found quite disappointing. Two very useful articles about translation of German patents were written for the Translation Journal some time ago by Kriemhild Zerling (http://translationjournal.net/journal/50patents.htm).

So what it is that you need to know as a patent translator? As a patent translator, you have to understand basic legal concepts and terms used in patents. You have to understand what a claim is, you have to know for example that one claim has to be described only in one sentence, no matter how long it is, and silly little things like that. You have to learn the meaning of magic terms and concepts like "prior art" or "inventive step", but contrary to popular belief, there is not really that much that you need to learn as far as the legal terminology is concerned. A good translator can learn these things on the job, so to speak. But you'd better learn them quickly or you will never have any clients.
You can also refer to machine translations into English available on the Japan Patent Office Website for unexamined Japanese patent applications since 1993, or to machine translations on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which can be used with Google Translate for machine translations from and into more than 30 languages. But remember, machine translations are not really translations - a machine will find words in another language based on an algorithm which really represents only a probable match. The machine has no idea what these words mean because only humans have ideas.

There are tricks that patent translators sometime develop while trying to stay sane, which is not that easy if you translate mostly patents. Especially Japanese patents can still drive me crazy sometime, even after all those years and thousands of patents. One trick that I can recommend to budding Japanese patent translators is really just something that common sense should tell you: You don't have to start from the beginning if the beginning is the most difficult part of the document, especially since the paragraphs are numbered. Unlike European patents, Japanese patents start with the claims, and monster Japanese sentences of continuous text in long claims can be very disorienting at first because in the beginning you are still trying to establish the technical terms. Start from "Prior Art" and "Detailed Description" and translate the claims at the end. However, since claims are often woven into the text of the "Specifications" several times, starting just after the introduction, this solution sometime does not work very well.

Another trick that I use when I can't figure out a discombobulated Japanese or German sentence is remembering the English translation of title of the patent application, which is often a complete sentence, and trying to visualize how the description of that concept can be applied to long, rambling and at first incomprehensible sentences. I find this visualizing technique very helpful. I think that we translators often make mistakes when we forget what it is that we are translating because we are concentrated so much on the meaning of just a few words that don't seem to make sense. When that happens, we can't see the forest for the trees. It really helps to keep in mind the purpose of the entire exercise.

If you are considering translating patents as a career, you can start with little steps. Don't accept long and complicated patents at first. Start with short and reasonably simple patents at first in a field that is not completely unfamiliar to you, many if not most patent applications will fall into this category. As you gain more experience, you will be better able to handle more complicated subject matters and the strange wording typical of "patentese" in any language.

If you are afraid that patents will be soon translated by Google Translate or some other machine translation software, I would not worry about it. The results of the influence of machine translation may differ depending on the field, but I am certain that the main result of machine translation in the field of patent translation will be that as more patents are identified with machine translation, more and more of them will eventually have to be translated by humans when a real translation is needed.
Good Luck!

Risk considerations for translating patents

Martin Cross, president of Patent Translations Inc. and co-author of the American Translator Association's Patent Translator's Handbook maintains the blog Translating Patents, which, though infrequent in its posts, often has excellent information. Martin published an article last autumn on IPToday.com discussing the management of patent translation risks, which is very worthwhile to read whether you are a translator or an individual possibly in need of patent translation services.

In the article, Mr. Cross discusses strategies for determining where one can save on translation costs and where doing so could be a disaster. Importantly, he also repeatedly mentions that patent translations which are most reliable and are of the highest quality are inevitably those reviewed by at least a second person competent in the language and subject matter. No surprise there, but it is depressing to see how seldom this principle is applied effectively. Review by persons who do not have competence in the subject and language is also of limited value: since the beginning of the year I have been asked on a number of occasions to review chemical patents which I know have been checked by two good translators and an attorney, and I have found serious linguistic and terminological issues with every one of these. Two Germans and a French person, none of whom are chemists, just can't ensure the accuracy that a native English-speaking chemist can for a patent translated into English. No way. They can find omissions and typographical errors and question apparent inconsistencies, but I wouldn't push it beyond that.

Obviously there are many people who disagree with me on this point, and one often finds translations - especially of patent abstracts - on the Internet which are drawn straight from the sewer of competence. If these are used as sources of terminology one should be very, very careful.

Mr. Cross also wrote a relevant essay describing the joys of producing bad text in translation: "Their worst work is my best work". It's a fun and useful read for those not familiar with the quirks odf patent translation.