Snowball – Live

I thought I would try something different here. What I’m going to do is use Snowball, which I mentioned in my last post, as a new CAT tool, for the very first time, and I am going to blog about it as I go.

So here I go over to the snowball website to download the program and set it up. It is now 3:20 PM.

It is now 3:23 PM and the software is downloaded and installed and registered.now I am going to read their quick start guide from the website.

It is now 3:26 PM and I have read the quick start and the cheat sheet and, after making myself a coffee, I will come back and start using the program.

It is now 3:40 PM and I have figured out Snowball, been impressed by it, and realized that I cannot use it. I must say, that it was extremely cool to see that it offered useful translations of the headings in the patent right out of the box. It took no time whatsoever to be able to start using this application and for it to be useful. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who was going to translate a European language. Unfortunately, it was not possible to segment Japanese. In the first sentence, it went along until it came to the first katakana “bo” and I could extend the segment to the other side of that “bo” or to the end of the sentence, but not to individual words. Snowball was obviously looking for the spaces between or what it considered to be punctuation and is not capable of dealing with languages that do not use spaces. But perhaps in the future this problem will be overcome (all they have to do is get it to recognize a switch from kana to kanji, which is what MS Word does and is pretty simple from a programming point of view) in which case I will gladly give it another try.

There was, however, another reason why I decided not to go any further with my explanation of Snowball and that is that the source text is entirely overwritten, and disappears. That means that, when you go back to check over your translation, or when,on page 3, you change your mind about the way on page 1 should have been translated, you would have to go back to the source document to find the source text. Side-by-side presentation of the source and target texts, and the ability to search for both source and target in the translation is 75% of the utility of a CAT program and Snowball, not having this, is not really going to cut it.

ATA Conference

In the last week of October, I went to the ATA’s 50th Annual Conference in New York, to speak and to listen. I had lived in NYC until three years ago (I’m now on the west coast) and I have to admit that being at the conference in Manhattan did remind me of why I decided to move. At times it seems that every third person on the sidewalk is swearing into their cell phone. Fortunately, I also spent a few evenings in Brooklyn, which reminded me of why I used to live there in the first place. Brooklyn rocks! The conference itself was a bit on the large side and, being spread out over several floors, I found that it was not all that easy to bump into people and chat. On the other hand, the hotel was fairly nice by conference standards, and there was lots of space for the booths, which were all in once place, so browsing was easy.

I did my presentation on the Saturday morning at 9:00 and had a respectable crowd, despite the hour. I took business cards from about seventy people who wanted to receive copies of the slides, and there were lots of questions and comments, which I generally take as a sign of a happy audience. A couple of people commented on my own enthusiasm and I suppose it is true that I have my share of it. Having done this for more than twenty years now, there are days when a translation has all the appeal of a bowl of porridge without sugar, but it is usually fun. In particular, I enjoy editing the work of good translators, especially where the going gets particularly tough. Sometimes translation is little more than bilingual typing but at other times, where there is a complex linguistic or technical puzzle, and am indeed enthusiastic.

I saw a number of interesting presentations. I think my favorite was probably Legal Translation: Raising the Bar by Steven M. Kahaner, Thomas L. West III, and Alejandro M. Garro. For full disclosure, I have known Steve for a few years and, when we met this time, he gave me a dictionary so big that, on the way back home, the check-in people at the airport had to put a HEAVY sticker on the suitcase that carried it. But that is not why this presentation was my favorite.  What I liked about it was that it reminded me that other people actually do more difficult translation work than me. We patent translators can sometimes get to thinking that we have the trickiest jobs in the field. But these guys — the high-end legal translators — have to do comparative law on the fly. They need to look at the source text (say a court ruling) and produce a target text that can be understood by people who are operating in a whole different system of law (for example, translating a civil law ruling for a common law target audience). That takes a lot more than dictionaries. And while some similar challenges are found in translating patents (for example, when translating for filing under the Paris Convention) pretty well everything you need to know will fit in one book (a big, fat, heavy book, I’ll grant you, but one book nonetheless). For these guys, the range of stuff they might be called upon to know would barely fit into the required reading list of a law degree.  Having seen how the other half lives. I feel happier than ever to be a narrow minded patent translator.

I also saw three presentations from the Japanese  Division. It was fascinating to see the different approaches in two different presentations dealing with translation and interpretation for discovery. In Discovery: What is It and What is the Role of the Translator? by Brenda K. Seat, translators were reminded that they were the eyes and ears of monolingual attorneys. She made the case that the translator is a part of the team put together by the law firm, and therefore cannot consider themselves neutral. In particular, she emphasized the importance of alerting attorneys to inconsistencies and sharing observations based on materials previously seen by the translator/interpreter as well as their own cultural knowledge. I had mixed feelings about this. In some cases it is indeed appropriate, if that is what the attorney has asked you to do. In other cases, the translator knows so little of the details of the case that speculation as to what is and is not important may be a waste of time or even a liability, especially if the opining is done in writing. It is also worth remembering that, when the accuracy of a translation is contested by the other side, the impartiality of the translator is a valuable asset. Your client can choose to manage that asset however they see fit, but if you shower them with uninvited emails with advice for winning the case, they will have a hard time claiming that the translation you certified was prepared from a neutral standpoint. Of course, Ms. Seat is herself an attorney, which changes the equation quite a bit in her particular case.

Meanwhile, Translation and Interpreting During the Discovery Process in Civil Litigation, Kayoko Takeda, Satomi Nishimuro, and Hidemi Harada emphasized a very different approach. Translators were reminded that the job of the translator/interpreter and the job of the attorney were two distinct things. Dr. Takeda also pointed out that, while the translator/interpreter certainly works for their client, they also have an inherent allegiance to their profession. What this means is that not all client requests need to be accommodated, if the translator does not feel that they are appropriate. She pointed out that attorneys themselves have clients, and they certainly will not comply with client requests if they violate the code of their profession. Likewise, doctors receive all sorts of requests from their clients, but quiet often need to say that certain things are not, in their opinion, suitable. The position of the translator is not much different. The presentation also discussed the ethical issues surrounding interpreters providing clarification based on their own knowledge in the course of the deposition. The general consensus was: not very ethical.

The two presentations did not contradict each other, but they certainly focused on very different ends of the continuum of translator association with their client in the discovery process.

Another presentation of note was Translating Patents to/from Japanese, by Taro Yaguchi. Mr. Yaguchi is a patent attorney with an incredible wealth of experience and a frank, straightforward style, that was truly refreshing. For example, I have seen Japanese prosecution histories where it was very clear that there had been a mistake in the translation of the foreign specification into Japanese but where, rather than use the provision that specifically allows the translation to be corrected, the prosecuting attorney argues and amends and  ends up with a half-baked wording that doesn’t really reflect the original. Mr. Yaguchi pointed out that some Japanese firms may be reluctant to correct the translation because that would entail admitting that they had made a mistake and not billing the client for the work spent on the correction. Of course! Mystery solved. I was particularly stuck by his observation that, if the translation was prepared by a third party (that would be us), Japanese law firms feel no such reluctance to simply correct. This implies that US law firms working directly with translation agencies, rather than entrusting the translation to a Japanese law firm, will enjoy more effective use of the provision in the Japanese patent law that is intended to allow for faithful adherence to the original language.

As for booths, the most interesting thing I saw was the new Computer Assisted Translation program Snowball (I don’t know if it is coincidental that Snowball is the name of the Simpsons cat — get it, CAT). I haven’t yet had a chance to really play with it, but it looks fun and handy. It works at the sub-segment level and does a lot of background processing. I suspect it will be less than brilliant for Japanese, but the approach makes a lot of sense, so I want to try it.

Back home after and insanely busy month, November has been somewhat more forgiving so far. I even went skiing last weekend. Mount Baker has six feet of new snow. So if you were wondering why I decided to move west, I took a picture of the answer from the lift:

New Website

After a lot of hard work on the part of Simon at Diligo Designs our new website is up and running. The content is mostly the same, but the look is all new and hopefully it is a bit easier to navigate.

If you haven’t looked at these before, why not check out our resources for patent attorneys and paralegals or our resources for patent translators.

Overbar Macro

I have often found it annoying to have to insert overbars manually in MS word for things like logic signals. Today I wrote a three line macro to do it. With this macro you select the text that you would like an overbar over and run the macro. That’s it.

If you want to use this macro but don’t know how to add macros to MS Word, leave a comment and I will try to explain.

Sub overbar()
Dim sText As String
sText = Selection.Text

Selection.Fields.Add Range:=Selection.Range, Type:=wdFieldEmpty, Text:= _
“EQ  \x\to(” & sText & “)”, PreserveFormatting:=False
End Sub

Going Both Ways

In days of yore, when multilingualism was de rigeur for Europeans of a certain class, foreign governesses forced children to translate poems from their native language into whatever language they were trying to learn. They were expected to preserve rhyme, meter and meaning.  This may seem ridiculous to us, but I doubt that it seemed unreasonable  to the children’s parents, who themselves might be called on to write and publish on philosophy and science in Latin or even Greek — languages that they had never heard spoken by a native tongue.

More recently, when we think of translations into a language other than the translator’s mother tongue, we bring to mind the output of the well-intentioned innocents who produced such classics as the Korean knife label reading, “Keep out of children,” or the French hotel sign that says, “Please leave your values at the front desk.”

It is with good reason that translations prepared by native speakers of the target language have become standard. And yet, there is a risk in this trend too.  Very good translators, with fluent command of their second language, can still misread the source text in ways that are much less likely for native speakers. “False friends” and idioms are common pitfalls, but even ordinary sentences, if sufficiently complex can mislead a non-native speaker. A particular problem with this type of mistake is that, because the target text is being written by a native speaker, in many cases, it will be impossible to detect the mistake by reading the target text alone.

At PTI, our standard practice is to work in teams, in which one translator is a native speaker of the source language and the other is a native speaker of the target language. We check our translations word-by-word and often the two translators will discuss the tricky parts.

This two-heads approach means that the first translator to work on the document does not always have to be a native speaker of the target language. That’s why I occasionally get the opportunity to translate into languages other than my native English, with the safety net of knowing that my working will be carefully reviewed by another translator who will be able to fix all my keep-knife-out-of-children type blunders. Admittedly, this is much easier in the field of patents than it would be for, say, advertising copy. Almost every patent is written using the same register, and boilerplate, stock phrases and standardized vocabulary abound.

I am very appreciative of the insight that I gain by way of my (always painfully slow) translations into Japanese or French. There are levels of intimacy with a language that can only be reached by writing in that language. You can read a phrase a hundred times and understand it, but it is when you are called on to write it that you truly own it.

One realization that this sort of work often brings about for me is how linguistic constraints force the hands of Japanese patent drafters. There are lots of fancy turns of phrase that show up in Japanese patents, but which are rarely seen anywhere else. I may know full well what the phrase means, having translated it countless times, and yet feel a sort of resentment to it. I can’t help thinking, at times, that the author is just trying to show off.  And then one day, translating into Japanese, I will find myself needing to express something with a certain degree of specificity and certain broadness of scope and, lo and behold, I will find that there are no words that so adequately express it as the fancy phrase I was silently mocking just a few days ago. After that, well, me and the phrase are buddies. When I see it in a source document, I don’t just know what it means, I know its shoe size and its favorite flavor of ice-cream.

Likewise, when I muff it and use a Japanese phrase incorrectly, the other translator will explain why I am wrong, which will, at very least, improve my understanding of the phrase, and sometimes open up whole new ways of looking at a grammatical structure or a term.

My son is studying French in grade-school now (alas, we have no governess) and I am not sure that I would want him to be forced into translating poetry into French, but if he were to follow his father’s footsteps into the translation business (a highly unlikely hypothetical) I would encourage him to find a partner and go both ways from time to time.

Managing Patent Translation Risks

My apologies for not being much of a blogger recently. What I did manage to do was to write an article for IP Today, so in place of a blog post, perhaps you woudl be willing to read that.

EPO MT in MIP

Sorry for the acronym string. I couldn’t resist.

MIP (Managing Intellectual Property) is a trade journal out of London that does a good job of providing global coverage. They have a free newsletter called MIP Week, which is perfect for people like me, who want to stay abreast but are too cheap and lazy to read the whole magazine.

Yesterday they had more on a story that they originally reported In April — specifically, a translation breakthrough for Community Patents. The idea is to start granting European patents, without demanding that applicants provide translations into all 23 official languages. People wanting to read the patent could then use a proposed MT (machine translation) system. Interestingly, MIP reports that the translations would have no legal value, and that for the 1% of patents that are litigated (man, that’s a lot of litigated patents) human translations would prevail.

I can certainly imagine some juicy courtroom arguments when they start litigating patents without predetermined translations. It also makes me wonder about enforcement. If I spent money developing something that my research (reading MTed patents at the EPO) told me is not protected, and then I got sued for infringement because it turns out the MT translation was inaccurate, I would certainly feel mistreated. If my due diligence is expected to extend to procuring an accurate translation by myself, then the EPO is transferring translation costs to industry. If, on the other hand, due diligence doesn’t extend that far, why should I be penalized?

In any case, it should be fun. It makes me wish I were a European legal translator.

Google Translate

Let’s get this straight. I’m a big machine translation fan. Many of my colleagues think machine translation (or MT, as they call it) is the devil. They worry that MT might be after their jobs, or that MT might be giving a bad name to the general concept of translation. As a specialist, I see MT the way that a litigation attorney might see a website that will write your Last Will and Testament for $9.95 — it’s in the same general field, but it’s hardly a threat to my business.

If anything, in the world of patent translation, MT has increased the demand for human translation. Because of MT, foreign documents that nobody would have looked at in the past are being read. Some of these documents turn out to be significant. The significant ones get sent to people like us for a real translation.

You can imagine, then, that I was pretty pumped to hear that Google, the most beloved resource of all translators, is offering something new in the MT world. The truth is that Google has been offering machine translation for some time, but they recently revamped their systems in a way that has been causing a stir.

The new system works with a modified version of the currently fashionable statistical machine translation (SMT) method. Although I worked in MT development in the late 80s, and Patent Translations Inc. even offered a machine translation service for a while, I don’t have much expertise with SMT. I guess, as a child of the 80s, I still think of MT in terms of rules. I did, however, see a presentation on the state of the art of SMT at the 2006 ATA Translation Companies Division Conference in New Jersey. I’ve got to say, I wasn’t impressed.

SMT sounds great on paper. It works by looking at how human translators have translated things in the past and applying what it finds to new translations that it is asked to perform. The problem is that, in doing so, because rules are subordinate to statistical trends, it tends to forget about the grammar that bound the words in the original sentence together. Worse, some words can be left out of the translation all together, just because they were not used in the translation corpus that the program is basing its decisions on. The translated sentences often appear to make sense, but when compared to the source, it is clear that the original meaning was very different.

When I heard about Google’s new system, I gave it a French patent as a test. French is usually the best language for MT, and patents are fairly MT friendly. At first pass I was really impressed. There were some wacky bits, of course, but the overall readability was very good for MT, and the system had done what looked like an outstanding job at translating multi-word technical terminology — something that rule-based systems are notoriously poor at. Within a few minutes, however, my happy surprise had turned to dismay. Upon closer examination, I saw that identical technical terms were being parsed and translated in radically different ways at different places in the document. Completely extraneous material, which had not been so much as suggested in the source, was to be found here and there throughout the translation. And time and time again, important lexemes were missing. Not much headway has been made since 2006.

I’m not going to post the patent — it’s too long for one thing — but we can get an idea of both the advantages and disadvantages of the system by taking a look at how it handles the front page of Libé (a popular French paper) . Google translates the first headline as, “The students’ struggle to save their parade profs.” One is left wondering what a “parade prof” is but, as a liberal arts major, it’s not too hard for me to imagine, and the sentence flows well enough, so I’m likely to be willing to go with the flow and hope that I’m getting the gist. Unfortunately, the original French was, “Des lycéens «en lutte» défilent pour sauver leurs profs.” Systran’s rule-based MT translates the same sentence as “High-school pupils “in fight” ravel to save their Profs.” While it is clearly more common to see students unravel than ravel, at least the original grammatical meaning of the sentence is more or less preserved. And if we don’t know what the computer means by “ravel,” at least we know that we don’t know. (We could even go and ask a real translator, who would translate “défiler” in this context “march.”)

The next bit of text — the lead — shows Google Translate in a better light. The source is “Plusieurs milliers de lycéens se sont rassemblés à Paris cet après-midi pour protester contre les suppressions de postes d’enseignants. Une nouvelle manifestation doit avoir lieu mardi.” Systran (rules based) gives this as, “Several thousands of high-school pupils gathered in Paris this afternoon to protest against the removals of posts of teachers. A new demonstration must take place Tuesday.” While the meaning is clear enough, it is definitely unpleasant to read. The readability is much better with Google, which gives it as, “Several thousand students gathered in Paris this afternoon to protest against the abolition of posts of teachers. A new event is scheduled to take place Tuesday.”

The last sentence is particularly impressive. It’s smooth. It’s slick. It conveys the gist of the source text. It even sounds like it was written by a native speaker of English. There is only one problem: that’s not what the source text said. There was no specific mention of scheduling, and the thing that was to take place was not a generic event — it was very specifically a demonstration.

Some readers may think that I am splitting hairs, and I would be the first to admit it. I wrote av entire chapter on hair splitting for the ATA Patent Translator’s Handbook. That is because patent practice — the prosecution and litigation of patents — is all about splitting hairs. You get whole teams of lawyers working through the night on arguments such as, “You said circle, but this is an oval,” or “Moving something is totally different from transporting something.”

That makes Google Translate woefully inappropriate for patent attorneys. When reviewing prior art –which is the only thing that patent attorneys use MT for — what an attorney wants to know is whether certain technical ideas have been described. To do that, they need to know if specific elements have been mentioned. Google Translate, while producing relatively readable output, adds (“scheduled”) and removes (“demonstration”) specific elements according to the whims of its statistical heart. And that just won’t do.

For now, patent practitioners are better off sticking to the built in MT engines available on the EPO and JPO websites and the rule-based Systran system.

For other people, Google Translate is certainly going to be a useful offering. The readability and the (somewhat unreliable) capacity to convey gist will make things written in foreign languages more accessible. Google translate also comes with some pretty nifty bells and whistles. My favorite is the ability to see what the source text actually said, just by moving your mouse over the text. It also gives you the capacity to search the (literally0 World Wide Web in foreign languages by typing in a word in English and letting Google translate that for you before using it in a search and then returning the hits in translated form.

So while the new kid on the block is unlikely to rock the world of patent practitioners, it at least makes a cool toy to play with.

ATA Patent Translator’s Handbook

Contents

v	Preface
vii	Introduction
	
	PART I: THE ART AND PRACTICE OF PATENT TRANSLATION
3	Approaches to Patent Translation: Many Ways to Build a Mousetrap	Kirk Anderson
11	An Introduction to Patent Translation	Nicholas Hartmann
19	Literal Translation of Patents	Martin Cross
29	Industrial Property Considerations for Patent Translators	R. Vivanco Cohn
	
	PART II: TOOLS AND RESOURCES FOR PATENT TRANSLATORS
41	Internet Resources for the Translation of Patents Into English	Steve Vlasta Vitek
49	Developing a Lean, Mean Patent Translation Memory	Suzanne Friis Gagliardi
	
	PART III: PATENT LITIGATION
57	Managing Patent Litigation Projects	Alison Carroll and Lillian Clementi
	
	PART IV: INDUSTRYSPECIFIC RESOURCES FOR PATENT TRANSLATORS
75	Translating Biotech Patents	Alice M. Berglund
85	Intellectual Property and Biotechnology Patents	Patricia Thickstun
97	Translating Automotive Patents	Gabe Bokor
	
	PART V: CONCLUSION
115	Live and Learn: Lessons from a Veteran Patent Translation Team: An interview with Jan McLin Clayberg and Olaf Bexhoeft	Conducted bv Alison Carroll and Lillian Clementi
	
	
119	Glossary of Patent Terms	Martin Cross
129	German-English Glossary of “Patentese”	Jan McLin Clayberg
135	Biotechnology Glossary for Patent Translators	Patricia Thickstun
151	Index

After a lot of hard work, especially on the part of Alison Carroll, our editor, The Patent Translator’s Handbook is now on sale. The book is a compendium of knowledge by some of the world’s most experienced and knowledgeable patent translators and translation managers and includes an introduction by a patent attorney who is also a translator.

Although there are a number of books written in Japanese on the subject of patent translation, and the ATA publishes the Japanese Patent Translation Handbook, which is written in English, The Patent Translator’s Handbook is the first book written in English on the subjection of patent translation from all languages into English. A number of the contributors translate from German and there are even some German-English glossaries, but the book’s authors also translate from French, Japanese and Spanish and the chapters are written with translators of any language in mind.

The book is, first and foremost, a how-to guide for patent translators, with ample introductory information for the novice, but it also provides a formal definition of literal translation in the context of patents and a methodology for producing and evaluating translations according to this methodology. We can expect this to become a touchstone for law firms that manage their own translation and a reference in litigation where translation is an issue. There is also a chapter on managing translation for litigation, which every patent paralegal who works on multinational cases should read. In fact, I have already had calls from a few large law firms asking where they could buy a copy.

To answer that question, the best way is to order it online from the ATA. If you are wary of entering your credit card information online, you can also call the ATA at 03-683-6100.

My own chapter, which is on literal translation can be viewed online in the Resources section of the Patent Translations Inc. web site. I also contributed the glossary of patent terminology, and I hope to make that available online soon.

I am planning to blog in more detail about the individual sections and chapters but, for the moment, I’ll just post the table of contents to pique your interest — assuming that you are the sort of person whose interest is piqued by this sort of thing.

Attorneys Working Smarter

What once was a rate event has become a common occurrence. Attorneys now call us up several times a week to ask us to answer specific questions about what is or is not disclosed in a foreign publication or to have just specific sections of a document translated.

In days of yore, 97% of the requests we got were for complete translations and the other 3% were for translations of just the claims. Something is changing. I know I have done my part by sending out newsletters and making suggestions when I get an attorney on the phone. But the change is the result of more than advertising alone. A fair number of the people who contact us have never dealt with us before. They just call up saying that they want to find out what is in some documents and that they would rather not order a full translation if they don’t have to.

I’ve been asked by colleagues whether I resent this trend. After all, a full translation can bring in thousands of dollars, while summary reports and partial translations tend to run a couple hundred at most. In the long term, however, these types of orders always lead to more work. Firstly, because the attorney can gain access to foreign texts without racking up large disbursements, they are simply more likely to use foreign material. And when these cost-effective means turn up something of real value to the case, full translations follow. The second reason why smart-translation orders mean good business is that working this way requires trust. You cannot take this sort of request to a harried project manager at a translation factory that outsources texts of every description to students and housewives. These assignments require expertise, and being able to provide that expertise pays off in both customer loyalty and word of mouth referrals.

There are still plenty of situations in which the attorney knows from the start that they will need a full translation or knows that their fastest route to understanding is by perusing the complete document. That said, it is nice to see that those same attorneys are coming to realize that they have options.