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.

Their worst work is my best work

If you ever get a translation of a published patent from me that is full of run-on sentences, inconsistent terminology and weak logic, you may just be looking at my best work.

When translating patents for information or litigation support, our job of is like that of a court interpreter — we reproduce what was said without omission or embellishment and strive to make ourselves invisible. Our clients would not be well served if we added matter to fill in the gaps in an incomplete disclosure, or if we took on the role of editor so that the translated claims seemed better supported by the specification than they were in the original. And though it might be tempting to unify disparate terminology, by doing so, we could be denying our client a useful argument against the patent or — if our client is on the other side — producing a false sense of security that risks being shattered by a more accurate translation when used in court.

To the non-translator, turning bad writing in one language into bad writing in another might appear to be a simple task, perhaps even easier than producing a polished final product from a high quality original, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Imagine, if you will, a carpenter who is given a bookshelf and asked to produce a copy of it. If the joints are square and the screws are driven straight, then all that will be required of the craftsman is good carpentry. But if the original workmanship is shoddy, the task of faithful reproduction becomes much more difficult. The slope of a crooked shelf must be exactly matched. Nails that were carelessly bent over by a badly wielded hammer must be meticulously bent into that same shape with pliers. Finally, the overall structure of the copy, which is the sum of the individual flaws, must be just as rickety as the original, but no more so.

It’s the “not more so” part that is really hard. The translation must be readable . The information must be conveyed as clearly as possible. But as with any other form of reproduction, translation necessarily results in signal-to-noise loss, and part of the translator’s job is to compensate for this, so that the clarity of communication in the translation is comparable to that in the original. As anyone who has photocopied a faded fax will know, the loss is always tends to be more pronounced if you start with a low-quality original. That is why people who are new to translation sometimes produce gobbledygook that sounds as if it were written by the inmate of a mental hospital and, when questioned, reply with the familiar words, “But that’s what it says in the original.” The true skill of the translator lies in being able to reproduce the original content, without omission or embellishment, while maintaining the clarity and internal logic of the original, no matter how sketchy that may be. If you are interested in a methodology for doing this, read on.

Matters are made worse by the fact that sloppy writing is often the handmaiden of sloppy thinking. Badly worded specifications are also likely to include conclusions that do not follow from their premises, internal contradictions, misclassifications and straightforward misstatements of fact. A good translator will be extremely reluctant to reproduce such problems without first carefully double-checking and then seeking a second opinion from a colleague, to be sure that the error is, in fact, in the original writing and not in their understanding of it. In addition, when the technology being described is complex, these problems can make it much more difficult for the translator to fully grasp the invention being described.

Unfortunately, for monolingual purchasers of patent translations, it is very hard, if not impossible, to determine whether the badly written document on their desk is a well written specification that was badly translated, or a badly written specification that was expertly translated. In this regard, one can rely only on long relationships and trust. But if it comes off my desk, and it is less than elegant, rest assured that it is a carefully crafted labor of love.

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation

There goes Europe

It looks more an more likely that European country will soon be foregoing the requirement for translating EPO patents into the language of each of the member states that you file in. That is, of course, sad news for all those European translators who earn their living from this activity, but ultimately it frees up funds for more aggressive and comprehensive IP activities, which in tern will lead to more research and more litigation, which should give those translators plenty to do.