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.

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.

Too many cooks

I once translated a priority document together with another translator. We used a translation of the priority document, which had long ago been filed with  the USPTO, as our common terminology reference (that way both of us would use the same terms in our translations).

The translation published by the USPTO was probably done by a junior staff member in a Japanese law firm. I say that because the wacky English could never have been produced by a native speaker. I say ‘junior’ staff member because the translation was not consistent. In places, really bad expressions had been fixed, but they had been fixed into English that is still idiomatically incorrect, which suggests review by a senior member of the Japanese firm.

Where it got interesting was in the claims, where the corrections had clearly made by a US attorney. While you could see how what what was written in the translation could have lead a monolingual reader to imagine that was what was being said, they didn’t actually match up with the original Japanese.

The end result was an application with claims for something other than the client had original claimed. What is more, the claims as drafted in English were not supported by the translated description in the specification as filed.

This was a job that was being done at at distance and I know nothing about the party who requested the translation, so I don’t know whether they were challenging the patent (and therefore delighted by what they saw in the accurate translation) or defending the patent (and therefore crestfallen).

At PTI we have a multi-person editing system as well, sometimes with as many as four people (lead translator, checker, technical expert, legal expert, proofreader, etc.) making changes to a translation, but as the second-last step in the editing process is a translation checking step that includes verifying consistency of both terminology and substantive meaning,  problems like these could never occur.

Japanese patent law firms could achieve a similar effect just by having the Japanese attorney who reviewed the junior staff member’s translation read the US attorney’s version of the claims against the original.  It would be interesting to know how often this happens.

I can’t help myself

I know I promised to stop posting the silly offers that were sent to me but you have to see this one from a proofreading service.

All you have to do is send us your document as a word attachment with the deadline and we will guarantee delivery of a perfectly written document to give you complete confidence when you submit your work.

I guess they meant a “Word attachment.” Love it!

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation

10%

Some law firms are keen on saving as much as they can on translation costs. A difference of 10% can often be the deciding factor in choosing a translation provider. But I wonder how many compare the ratio of the number of words in the source text to the number of words in the target text.

Recently I shared a translation with anther translator. It was one of those frantic rush jobs for a court submission deadline and the law firm requested that, in order to save time, the two of us work independently without a common editor. When it came time to paste the finished translations into the template, I was surprised to see that the other translator’s work would not fit at the specified font size. After a bit of poking around, I found that the other translator was producing a target text with about 10% more words per unit of Japanese source text than mine. It was just a matter of writing style, and the problem was easily solved by reducing the font size, but it was interesting to note that, while we were probably both charging the same rate, one of us was more expensive than the other.

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation

Resources

At long last the resources section is back online in our new website. There are a couple of new things, including Power Point presentations from some talks I gave and an article on managing translation costs that every patent attorney really should read.

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation

Not a Patent!

I don’t know how they do it — ordinary translators that is. I had to translate some draft technical specifications (as in, specs, as opposed to a spec) today for a device that shall remain nameless. I say “remain” nameless because that’s the way it started out. I got 11 pages of technical description and a model number, but no hint as to what the device was and, of course, no helpful sections like, “Technical Field” or “Background.” Nor did I have the option of looking up the patent family. Nothing! Nada! Just a bunch of words on a piece of paper.

In the end I figured out what the mystery device was by Googling combinations of terms used in the document until I hit on a class of device that matched the description, but golly gee willikers — as Donald Rumsfeld would say — that sure is a lot of work.

And then there is this business of the author saying things that are not explict and surrounded by comforting redundant phrases. And no reference numerals!

I understand that I am spoiled, what I cannot figure out is why the gates to the patent translation specialization are not overrun by eager candidates fleeing the field of general technical translation.

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation

Patent Agent for a Day

My father passed away about a year ago, leaving us many patents for the high voltage devices that he had invented and licensed. I spent Sunday going through them, working out which were under license and which were not and checking the payment schedules for them.

My father hated the way law firms would charge nearly a thousand dollars to pay a maintenance fee to a patent office, and he had a point. It’s a hefty bill for five minutes of paralegal time. He paid them himself when he was alive, but didn’t leave any schedules behind, so I had to make one. Some payments were already due so I took care of that too.

After that there was an office action requiring some minor changes (antecedent basis and incorporation by reference — that sort of thing) so I fixed those and, on Monday called the examiner to make sure it was to his liking.

There was one case where a patent had lapsed in Australia (that country doesn’t send out reminders) and I did leave that one to a local attorney to sort out, but all-in-all it was pretty simple stuff, and I was kind of fun to play patent agent for a day, even if I was only representing myself.

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation

Wicked Wiki

I hadn’t noticed this before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_patent_law

It looks pretty good. It covers the application processes, differences with respect to other countries and all the basic stuff that someone new to the system would want to know, plus links to the actual law and examiner’s guide lines.

I’d say bookmark it.

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation

Trying Work

Recently I’ve been translating a lot of litigation support stuff. Usually, when you say those words in translation circles, the images that come to mind are of boxes containing ten thousand pages of handwritten discovery documents that need to be translated in two days. What I am dong this time is a little different. I’m translating demands for trials, briefs, petitions and opinions for patent litigation that is being conducted in Japanese on behalf of English speaking people who need to keep up to speed with the trial and give their input. It’s fun.

For one thing, you get to watch the law in action. I write and present quite a bit on how to go about producing exact translations of patents and why conserving word choice is essential. I meet with a certain amount of skepticism and resistence from people who either do not believe that word choice can be translated, or who cannot believe that word choice really matters that much. They have obviously never followed a patent trial. It’s all about the words. And watching a trial unfold makes the reasons for the word choices by the drafting attorneys come alive.

The other thing is that it is easy. I translate a lot of Japanese office actions. Perhaps out of a desire to save ink at the JPO, examiners write their reasons for rejection in staccato verse, referencing bits and pieces of the application and and prior art and snippets of the law without explanation or elaboration. The poor translator, much like the poor applicant, has to hunt through the cited references, the Patent Law and JPO examination guidelines to understand what is being said. It’s time consuming and, for the most part, boring. Odd, but there is no passion in an patent examiner’s writing style. Trial documents are another story.

Literally. The thing is that they actually do tell a story, and the attorneys are at pains to make that story as engaging and convincing as possible. One thought leads to another. Themes are repeated and amplified. There is logical and narrative consistency. OK, it’s not Shakespeare and I admit that I should probably get a life, but if I have to sit there reading and reproducing text eight hours a day, it’s nice when it’s well written text.

Martin Cross
Japanese Patent Translation