The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/458734
Vol/54 No/1 2015 FEATURES translating and teaching English at a software company in China, where I learned many key software terms, I still had a lot to learn about how electrical circuits work. There are two ways to deal with a lack of background knowledge: read enough in the field until you grasp the core concepts or take a course. One colleague mastered the background knowledge of semiconductor devices and nanotechnology by translating those kinds of patents for a year straight. For me, a correspondence course in electronics seemed ideal. Free information, available on the internet, has lowered barriers to technical translation. Even though I am not a mechanical engineer, I am able to translate patents about them by searching for articles on diesel engines. Yet online searches can be a double-edged sword. A lot of false information is published, and terms that sound natural to a layperson may be incorrect. For example, in a patent context, we always use the word 'antenna' not 'aerial'. A shortcut to find out which term is used more commonly is checking which word or word phrase brings up more results on Google. Unfortunately, that might not bring up the answer a technical translator needs, so when doing a search, it is important to check that the term is used on multiple reliable websites. If it is mentioned on a manufacturer's webpage or an engineering publication, such as IEEE Spectrum, it is probably correct. Wikipedia is a good place to start a search, but not everything on the website is technical enough for a patent. Tricks of the trade Even with background knowledge and the help of the internet, patent translation is surprisingly challenging and takes a lot of practice. It is easy to make mistakes because the texts are extremely dense and each word carries a lot of importance. I made a lot of simple errors in the beginning, such as verb agreement or forgetting to use 'a' the first time a component is mentioned and 'said' or 'the' thereafter. Practising with a mentor or with a published translation is more helpful than simply reading patents in your source and target languages, as it allows you to compare your answers with a reliable resource. Google Patents provides full patent texts in multiple languages, but it takes some sleuthing to check if the patent was written by a native speaker. It is also important to double check whether the English version was machine translated, as machine translations are not generally helpful for learning how to translate patents. As I gained experience, I managed to develop other techniques to make the work less overwhelming. The first major trick is learning which words are used most often. A major part of patent applications is a description of which parts go where, so the most useful verbs are 'provided with', 'disposed on', and 'having'. The verb 'do' is imprecise; words such as 'execute', 'perform', 'enable' and 'cause' are preferred. Some phrases are used so often that my mentor called them 'boilerplate phrases'. The two most-used phrases are 'Disclosed in the embodiments of the present invention are' and 'The present invention relates to the technical field of'. Sometimes the first sentence in a patent abstract does not have a verb, e.g, 'A multifunctional sander comprising a sanding base, an aluminium plate and a sheet of sand paper'. This feels awkward at first, but after reading a hundred patents, it seems quite normal. Another important skill is perfecting your own quality control procedures. Since I noticed I had trouble with verb agreement, I would try to read the entire abstract aloud, focusing on that problem. To make sure I didn't miss a key adjective, I would underline each word in the source text once I found its equivalent in the target text. If I found a word that was not underlined, I knew I needed to go back and revise it. This method is useful in other areas of technical translation, and I use it whenever I come across a very dense text. Generally, I find that quality control takes more time in technical translation than it does in other fields. Rereading your translation is insufficient because the text is challenging and you are likely to miss your mistakes. You have to be prepared to work much more slowly than you usually do, and to make sure you are completely happy with your translation before you submit it. Keeping translations ambiguous was one of the hardest but most important things I had to learn about patent translation. As a person who likes to explain things, I often added words to try to make a sentence clearer; without fail, my mentor would make me change it back. He told me to keep the translation as unclear as the original because the ambiguity might be used to the patent applicant's advantage. The translation should read as the original reads, so adding information is inappropriate and unhelpful. The patent translators I have met are intelligent, analytical and hardworking. I have a great deal of respect for what they do. For anyone interested in dense technical texts and language, I recommend finding out more. It has paid off for a number of translators, and it might be beneficial to you too. Notes 1 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 2014, 'Patent Cooperation Treaty Yearly Review' 2 WIPO, 2014, 'US and China Drive International Patent Filing Growth in Record-Setting Year' 3 Op cit WIPO Yearly Review, 2014 Each word needs to be specific enough to prove that it is a new idea, yet broad enough to include multiple uses