How creative is a concert pianist? Just like a translator, she does not create anything new. She just translates notes that were written by somebody else and that she sees on a sheet of paper into music, the way a translator translates words from one language into another.

Unlike concert pianists, most people do not read notes, all they see are meaningless symbols. Branka Parlic sees symbols and hears the music in her head. But still, she does not really create anything new, does she? Oh, wait, she does. Leopold Stokowski, Svjatoslav Richter, or Mstislav Rostropovich would not play this piece by Philip Glass the way Branka Parlic is playing it. Every pianist, or every good pianist, creates new meaning for the notes on a sheet of paper every time he or she touches the keyboard. The meaning of the notes cannot be programmed into a digitized language, only the result of the playing can be recorded and then reproduced a million times. Why can’t we create a software program that would play music as well or better than humans? Or can we? (No, we can’t because we are not God seems like a good answer).

Creativity, or creating meaning where there was none, is a part of translation that is not understood by non-translators. Before a long patent claim is translated into English, only relatively few people, something like a mere hundred million, could read and understand a long sentence in a tricky Japanese claim. After I am done with it, at least a billion people will be able to read it, and some might even understand it.

In fact, I do feel like a concert pianist when I translate, especially when I translate long and complicated Japanese claims. Although unlike European and American patents, Japanese patents start with claims, I usually translate the claims at the end because at the beginning I am still trying to establish the correct terminology, the correct meaning of the notes, you could say. I touch the keyboard lovingly and longingly, just like a concert pianist. But unlike a pianist, I can go back and change the meaning of the words, and then often change it back to what it was originally.

I have my own playing technique too: I use a yellow highlighter to highlight と, (to, which means “and”, with a comma after that), then start from the end of the claim, jump to the beginning, divide the sentence into と(to) sections, and look for を(wo, which designates an object in Japanese). Perhaps other translators have other techniques, but vain as I am, I do believe that my technique is the best one, at least for me. I know that if I don’t highlight the to sections, I might forget one of them if there are 8 or 12 of them in one claim and the sentences are repetitive, which they always are.

I usually listen to music when I translate claims, this piano piece (Metamorphosis 2 by Philip Glass) would be very suitable for translating patent claims. Hip hop music would not be suitable for my purposes. You can’t really be hopping in your chair when you are reading Japanese characters and typing at the same time. I don’t think I will even try doing that. But opera works for me too, unless it has a heavy beat to it. New Age music is perfect for patent claims.

I like to translate patent claims early in the morning, just after I’ve had my first cup of coffee for the day and after I have quickly checked the news on the Internet to make sure that the world is still there. The meaning of the Japanese claims that I see in English in my mind, combined with the music that I hear with my ears, create a parallel kind of universe that is there just for me, early in the morning before everybody else wakes up, as I listen to my own music of the spheres, which may or may not be heard by other people when I am liberating the meaning of words that up until this point were hidden in a long string of Japanese characters or long German compound nouns.

One reason why I don’t use computer memory tools such as Trados is that I value my own creativity, the act in which I give meaning to Japanese characters that are meaningless to most people, but very meaningful to me. The artist and craftsman in me finds the whole concept somewhat barbaric. I don’t think that cutting and pasting sections of text from my old translations and jumping between two software programs on the screen would give me the kind of supernatural high that I experience early in the morning when I create something new in my own version of the universe, after I’ve had my first cup of coffee, just before I hear the thud of the newspaper hitting my porch as the night starts receding back to where it came from and a new day is dawning again.

An excerpt from Michio Kaku’s new book, “The Physics of the Future.”

Although human translation and human translators have been with us for a very long time, just about every time when I talk to non-translators about my profession, they ask me how long will it be before my work is done by computers. When I tell them that this will never happen, they mostly don’t believe me.

And I can understand why. Computers are so small and so powerful now that we think of them as being almost godlike. But how have computers changed the past and the present of translation and what will the future of translation look like? They have changed, and some would say doomed, the present and the future of newspapers and books, for instance. Even I have a Kindle now and I use it to buy and read books on it occasionally. I only take one newspaper now and only quickly scan several of them online, sometime on my Ipod. You could say that thanks to computers, newspapers have become much less relevant as people can ignore them now completely and get their information directly from blogs instead of from newspapers as they used to only a few years ago. Becoming more and more irrelevant is evidently the policy of The New York Times. I used to subscribe to this paper for years but I switched to Washington Post when they increased the price from a dollar to two dollars last year. I remember that I was wondering at that time what would happen to my customer base if I doubled my translation rates overnight. Since The New York Time informed me by e-mail last week that they would start charging for online access too, I will probably eventually stop reading it altogether.

In some ways, computers changed the translation universe beyond recognition as cheap or free machine translation became as ubiquitous as advertising. Just about everybody (at least everybody in the non-English-speaking world) is using machine translation to find out more about the world around us.

But seen from another perspective, you could also say that real translation, the kind that is produced by humans who understand and translate languages, has not really changed that much since the time of Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translators and librarians who lived about fifteen hundred years ago. It all depends on what your view of translation is. If you see it as mostly just moving words from one language to another, the future of translation is in memory tools such as Trados and more and better machine translation, while the only future available to translators will be human editing of the product of these computer editing tools and of the machine translation product. That is certainly one school of thought on the future of translation.

But that is not how I understand translation. Many translators, including this one, do not use computer memory tools at all because they are not suitable for their particular type of translation. This translator, for example, does not think that translation memory tools are not really suitable for patent translation. On the other hand, if for example a simplified version of a computer memory tool is incorporated in the next upgrade  of Microsoft Office, I may even buy it and give it a try. Which could be a demise of computer memory tools.

The way I understand translation – it is mostly about what things said in one language really mean in another language. Computer tools and software can be programmed by human programmers to look for meaning. Meaning is a category that can be simulated by software, but simulation is almost never a substitute for the real thing. Meaning is a category that is not and never will be accessible to machines, regardless of how powerful they may be by the time everybody who is reading these lines will have been dead for decades.

If translation is about finding some meaning in this world, meaning that it represented by words on paper or on the computer screen, there will be always need for translators. Some unlucky souls will probably be reduced to editing of the huge amount of the detritus of machine translation that will be left for them to work with. My heart goes out to them.

But I think that the main result of the permeation of our civilization by incredibly powerful, incredibly hungry and incredibly tiny computers that can spit out huge amounts of data in seconds will be more and more demand for people who can understand what this data means.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed under its own weight, an American philosopher by the name of Francis Fukuyama called this event “the end of history”. And I remember that another American philosopher by the by the name of Zbigniew Brzezinski (don’t you just love those American names?) said at that time:”After the end of history, there is more history.”

And there sure was. We could have actually used a little less history than what we did get. It is not a very difficult prediction to make: after the end of human translation, there will be more human translation.

About every fifth order for translating a patent from Japanese to English that I receive these days from a law firm is accompanied by a machine translation of the Japanese document. At first I was a little puzzled by this, but I no longer am. Since all unexamined Japanese patents applications published after 1993 can be translated with a machine translation function which can be used on the Japan Patent Office (JPO) website with an English interface, it makes sense to spend a few minutes on the Web to create a machine translation (MT) product for free before ordering a human translation (HT) which will cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. I used to and sometime still do receive also English abstracts produced by JPO, which are written by human translators whose first language is clearly Japanese (the English in these abstracts is sometime understandable to me only when I compare it to the Japanese original). It takes about half a year before these English abstracts, called “Patent Abstracts of Japan”, (or  PAJ), are available for new patent applications.

Human translation is thus a third source of information about Japanese patent applications available in English, after MT and PAJ, a relatively very expensive source, especially considering that both MT and PAJ are free to any user.

Why is human translation still needed? After all, it would seem that there is already a lot of information available in English for free. Is it possible, or perhaps even likely or inevitable, that as machine translation keeps being improved, the demand for human translation will be decreased and eventually eliminated?

I don’t think it is likely at all. Although MT has been available on the JPO website for about 15 years, as far as I can tell the quality of the MT product has not improved much during that time if it changed at all. The MT product is a very useful source of information, but it is not really a translation in the real sense of the word, merely a result of a computational conversion of words in one language to words in another languages based on certain rules and algorithms which do not take into account the real meaning of the words because meaning is a category (a function of human thinking) that cannot be reduced to rules and algorithms.

Nevertheless, I usually print out a machine translation before I start my work on a real translation. I look at the MT product quite a bit when I start translating because at that point I am still trying to establish the correct terminology and I often don’t really understand what the Japanese document is describing. At the beginning, confusion often reigns in the mind of this human translator, and the MT product can sometime help to ease this confusion. But as I start to understand the description of the problem that is to be solved by the patent, I usually only look at the Japanese text and occasionally at my computer display without looking at the MT product  at all because looking at a third source would unnecessarily slow me down and time is precious to me. However, I still look at the MT product one more time when I proofread my finished translation at the end, usually the next day, because the most common mistakes human translators make and computers almost never do are omissions such as skipping a number or a line, or even a paragraph.

One could say that machine translation has already become another useful tool, which is available not only to patent lawyers who can use MT before they decide to spend a lot of their client’s money to have a certain document really translated, but also to this human translator who can use it just like a dictionary, or as an online source of information like an online dictionary or Wikipedia.

This function of MT as a very useful tool is an aspect that is almost never mentioned in articles that are published every now and then in newspapers because these articles are written by authors who do not really understand the issues involved, and who usually simply describe juicy anecdotal evidence obtained from users of MT, seasoned with unhealthy propaganda from  MT developers, without bothering to talk to real translators who actually may know a lot about MT because they understand the issues and because they are using MT all the time in their work. A typical example of such an article is linked here in my previous post on this subject.

There were two very interesting articles examining among other things issues relating to machine translation and human translation in the January 2011 issue of The Chronicle, a newsletter of the American Translators Association. One, written by Nicholas Hartmann, is titled Real Voices: What Translators Do and Why We Need to Keep Doing It. The other article, written by Michael Karpa and called Translating in the Deep End, also deals to some extent with machine translation.

Both of these articles are quite long but well worth reading. Because I want to keep my posts relatively short, I will not try to add my attempt at an analysis of these two articles here, other than to mention the obvious contrast between both of these articles and the nonsense that is often published in our “mainstream media” on the subject of machine translation by people who don’t know anything about translation and don’t seem to care about it at all. A major newspaper publishing an article about machines translation, such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, should be able find somebody who either is a translator, or who is at least smart enough to realize that he needs to talk to translators to write an article about something like that. But perhaps I am asking too much. These people probably think that most translators have been already “eliminated” by MT.

It is a pity that the public at large will probably never read a useful analysis of what MT really is and what it can never be.

Instead, they will be probably subjected yet again to another unhealthy dose of commercial propaganda from MT vendors, sprinkled with total lack of understanding of the underlying issues and thinly veiled contempt for human translators in the next article about machine translation that is likely to be published soon again in the dead tree media. But based on what has been published so far, the article will have a lot of really funny stories about hilarious machine translations and it will also say that Google Translate changed everything (they all do). Google translate is a very useful tool but it changed everything. Human translation is in a different category than machine translation and probably always will be. Very few of us know that thanks to what passes for journalism these days.

A somewhat pessimistic view of the future of our profession was expressed on that blog by Robin Bonthrone, who said among other things:” What I find disappointing is that there is practically zero research being carried out into the *economics* of translation, a subject that appears to be of little or no interest whatsoever to translation academics (maybe translation attracts the wrong sort of academics?). I can’t think of any other job or profession that is so poorly researched in terms of the microeconomic fundamentals and interactions. The translator’s invisibility strikes again?”

And it is true, other than the annual compensation surveys by ATA, which may or may not reflect the reality of an almost infinite number of “markets for translation”, I don’t know of any other research in the United States into the economics of the translation business. But how do you research something like that? What is translation and who does it? This is an infinite subject. Anything that has been written in one language can be and occasionally is translated into another language. Very different rates are paid for different language combinations and subjects in different countries. From what I can gather from anecdotal information and information available on blogs and online, the rates vary from about 1 cent per word 40 cents per word and more, based both on US dollars and Euros, if one ignores machine translation, which is not really translation at all and mostly free as it should be.

On the other hand, we translators all know what kind of rate we can get from a certain client, pretty much to the half cent. So which is it, is there an infinite range of rates and income potentials, or is there in fact only one rational rate, namely the rate that I am getting right now for my translation and that you are getting for your translation?

About 25 years ago, just before I launched my innovative and groundbreaking patent translation service, I met a translator in San Francisco who at that point had been making a living very successfully as a freelance technical translator from Japanese for more than 20 years. He told me the following:“People have no idea what translators do and who they are. They think it is an old lady working in the basement on a typewriter, and that’s all they really care about.” (This was back when people were still writing mostly on typewriters). Shortly after that I had the good fortune of getting fired for low-level insubordination by a stupid blonde from a really stupid job, which forced me to reluctantly launch my patent translation career.

Things have changed a little since 1986, but not that much. Most translators are still invisible and many are reduced to fighting over scraps of translation work posted on online venues that pay pitifully low rates. Sometime they protest, and they may even try to organize sometime.

But the problem is, they are still invisible. The people who pay for our translations, and I mean the people who order translations, not the myriads of brokers, probably still think of us as faceless and nameless old ladies working in the basement somewhere. We have progressed from the typewriter to computers, but so did everybody else. Does the world understand and appreciate our work now a little bit more than it did 25 years ago or 250 years ago? Probably not. In fact, “translator” was probably a much more prestigious profession 250 years ago, as there was no free machine “translation” back then and very few people could in fact translate.

Somehow we have managed to stay invisible for quite a few centuries now and it looks like the 21st century will not be any different. Sometime we do talk among ourselves on blogs, and some of us have websites, but most translators are perfectly happy to stay almost completely invisible and work for the middleman who will take his middleman’s cut, usually 50%. We sign long contracts in which we promise not to interfere with the middleman’s business and make all kinds of other strange promises, such as that if the middleman wants to sue us, we will gladly pay his lawyer’s fees. I am not kidding. Most contracts sent by agencies to translators seem to have this clause these days. The only thing that protects us from being sued, really, when we sign such a strange contract, is that the lawyers probably know that they would not be able to collect much if anything from us.

Instead of trying to figure out where the customers are, we fill out questionnaires sent to us by agencies so that they could then send a bunch of e-mails to a bunch of warm bodies and see which pet has been domesticated enough to offer the lowest rate if there is finally a job in our language combination.

It is a lot of work if you want to understand who your end-customers are and how to find them, or rather, how to make them find you in the age of Internet. We simply don’t want to work that hard!

So we stay invisible, and bitch and moan about the outrageously low rates that the broker and the public at large is offering these days. And since we are so afraid that machines will put us out of work one day soon anyway, we see no other way but to accept the outrageously low rates being offered today, before all translations are done for free by big, smart machines, who will soon be installed in the basement instead of the nameless and faceless old ladies who used to do translations there in the old days.

If armies of expensive lawyers have been replaced already by smart computers as chronicled in this frightening New York Times Article, how can poor translators stand a chance?

Which sounds like a great topic for my next blog.

Servile imitation (sklavische Nachahmung in German, which literally means “slavish imitation” in German, imitation servile in French, and 引き写し or 敷写し[hikiutsushi or shikiutsushi], literally “tracing” in Japanese), is a term from intellectual property law which is based on laws against unfair competition. Servile imitation occurs when a company imitates a successful product of a competitor to create confusion in the mind of a customer who will then buy a product thinking that he is buying something else. This “something else” is usually a more expensive, very high quality product of a well known manufacturer. It happens all the time and the laws on the books are probably not easy to enforce. For example a few years ago I bought at Sam’s Club a mini audio system for our kitchen that looked just like Bose Wave music systems, which start at 500 dollars and which can cost well over a thousand dollars. The pretty little gadget that I bought for 200 dollars, I think, was barely functional and it was no Bose. The sound was nothing to write about on your blog, and the CD player was unusable because it kept cutting off and starting again. Obviously, it was made in China.

To create confusion in the mind of the customers is in fact what advertising is all about. And it is certainly working as the customers are confused about all kinds of things, including translation.

Yesterday I received a phone call from a patent lawyer who wanted to know my rates and other particulars about my translation services, such as who does the translation and whether this person knows, for example, what a claim in a patent means. And then he said: “Do you provide translation or mechanical translation?”.

It took me about a second to figure out that by “mechanical translation” he meant machine translation. Perhaps he ordered machine translation first and now he needed to figure out what was really in that Japanese patent. So I explained to him that our translations,  are real translations that are indeed done by humans rather than machines, and that Japanese patents in particular are done by a very experienced human translator who has been translating claims in Japanese patents for the last 24 years, for example by this mad patent translator or another highly experienced patent translator. I also told him that a good patent translation is as close as you can get to what the Japanese document says without actually having to learn Japanese. He then asked for my rates, we thanked each other, and that was that.

I think that “servile imitation” would be a good way to describe what a good patent translation is supposed to be. In some fields of translation, the translators are allowed much more freedom and in some respects they need to be much more creative than in my field of patent translation. If you want to translate for example Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra into another language, you really have to create a different language similar to Nietzsche’s quasi biblical and quasi archaic version of German that he used in that book in another language. You sort of need to recreate Nietzsche’s madness in another language in your own mind.

You don’t have to do that in a patent translation. Patents have a logical structure and a fairly simple language that is easy to follow if you know and understand the technical terms used in them.

But that is not to say that you don’t need to be creative with this kind of “servile imitation”, which is the term that I am using here to describe translation of patents.

With long and rambling sentences in German or Japanese, you really have to be creative to figure out which adjective belongs to which noun, where are the verbs and which verb belongs to what. With Japanese, you often have no subject, and other indications of parts of speech and categories that are essentially always present in European languages, such as singular or plural or the tense, are usually also missing in the claims of Japanese patents.

Just like a translator of a novel, you really have to get into the mind of the person who wrote the text that you are translating. If the Japanese patent agent uses a strange combination of characters, you have to make a decision: is this a mistake or is this unusual character used in this word on purpose? Some claims are written in such a broad, roundabout way that trying to translate them faithfully without creating a completely ridiculous sentence in English is almost an impossibility. Finding the right compromise in such a case is not easy and a lot of creativity is again needed.

In traditional Japanese culture, a certain kind of imitation is considered to be the highest form of creativity. A student of martial arts, for instance, is supposed to imitate exactly what the master is doing, while being slapped and kicked around and fed a steady diet of nonsensical koans (公案), until the student becomes as good as the master so that he could then surpass the master.

Some claims in patents are not that different from koans of ancient Japan. They sort of make sense only on a certain level. They are repeated so many times in the text of a patent application, at least in the “Prior Art”, in the “Means to Solve Problems” and in the “Effect of the Invention” that the whole thing sounds just like a Buddhist prayer.

The servile imitation that is a must in translation of patents can be very creative indeed, although admittedly, a very special kind of creativity that needs to be also combined with servility is involved when it comes to patents.

For a really creative and productive servile imitation in your patent translation, you first have to find the answer to the ageless question: “Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born.”

You don’t have to do that to translate a dumb novel.

Every time I read another article about machine translation, I have the same feeling of futility that I experience also when I listen to John Lennon sing “A Day in a Life” (I read the news today, oh, boy, the English army has just won the war …..).

All of these articles have interesting anecdotes about unlucky users of MT who perhaps expected too much, and many of them start with one such anecdote as did this article by Konstantin Kakaes in Washington Post. His blog has the following introduction: I’m a freelance journalist. I have many interests, though these days my focus is writing about nuclear proliferation, science, technology and the world. I also write about Latin America. It does not say anything about what he knows about foreign languages and linguistics. Perhaps he knows some Spanish. That would be an improvement.

All of these articles in what I call corporate media, because I think that is the proper term for it, are written by journalists who have various backgrounds, often impressive ones. But none of them has a background in languages and linguistics. These journalists then interview users and developers of machine translation, but they are not interested in talking to people who translate for a living. I was once interviewed by phone on this subject by a journalist in Canada about 8 years ago, but that is the only exception to the rule that I can think of. Apparently, human translators have nothing of importance to say about machine translation.

The recent crop of articles tells the readers that everything changed with the advent of Google Translate, which is now here, as Kakaes puts it, “to remove humans from equation”. Right. Let’s use mathematics to find the magic algorithm that will eliminate the need for human brain. Kakaes says among other things in his article that the late Frederick Jelinek (which is a Czech name), who pioneered work on speech recognition at IBM in the 1970s, is widely quoted as saying: “Every time I fire a linguist, my translation improves.” I suspect the late Frederick Jelinek was firing linguists because they were telling him 40 years ago something that he did not want to hear, namely the same thing that I am saying in this blog.

“I am sorry, but machine translation will never work, Herr Jelinek.”

“Vhat did you say? You are fired, you damn ingrate.”

It does not take a genius to figure out that the statistical approach pioneered by Google will not really work either. The way the commercial propaganda machine writes and talks about it, real machine translation that will get rid of people like me and the readers of this blog is just around the corner. It has been just around the corner for quite a few decades now.

But machine translation is not really translation at all, although it may look like one, and never will be because no algorithm will obviate the need for the concept of meaning in translation. Trillions of words in a database are really nothing more than a huge haystack hiding what is missing and always will be missing in machine translation – the meaning of the words. You need a human to make sense out of things. Google is such a great engine because thousands of very smart human programmers analyze and update links to information every second of every hour of every day. If Google stopped doing that, it would be out of business within a few weeks.

But you can’t really put everything that humans say now and will say in the future into a huge database that could be used for machine translation by Google Translate in the same way that Google the search engine can be used. People who got used to the miracle of Google the search engine naturally expect this to happen one day soon with Google Translate. Only it never will. We are all unique. We all say things that nobody else has ever said and possibly never will …. we don’t do it all that often, but we all do it. The human brain is not a database. I don’t know what it is that makes it work the way it does, nobody really knows, but I do know that it’s not a database that can be updated just like a search engine. Because language is what it is, the most likely equivalent to a sentence in another language can be correct … or completely incorrect. Probability is not a replacement for meaning. And machine translation will never break the barrier of meaning.

30 years ago, you had to pre-edit and post-edit every machine-translated sentence, otherwise it would make no sense. In the second decade of the 21st century, you still have to pre-edit and post-edit everything, except for really simple sentences, see the example of an international lawyer who uses MT for translation from English to Chinese in the Washington Post article. But when you make a conscious effort to use only short and simple sentences, this is really pre-editing too.

Machine translation is getting better at simple tasks like this, and the statistical approach may be more instrumental than linguistic analysis. I don’t really know that much about it as I prefer to spend most of my time doing the real thing …. translating.

This blog post is too long, I am tired and I am going to finish it now. But I would like to pose a question here.

Do you think that it is possible to create software, similar to machine translation software, that would write steamy romance novels that women would actually be buying and reading?

And if not, why not?

It’s just stupid words on a page. Just like a translation.

I had this brilliant idea the other day that I could write a blog about search phrases that were used by people who somehow ended up on my blog. I swear to God, the text in italics below is the genuine article. I simply picked a few assorted items and only added question marks where I thought they were intended. So here it is:

1. don’t understand how to use trados, 2. don’t like trados, 3. why not to use trados, 4. can i make a translation memory out of files I translated without trados? 5. can use trados 2009 with pdf?, 6. trados is hard, 7. trados sliding scale, 8. i absolutely hate sdl trados studio 2009 9. is christiane amanpour monolingual? 10. does christiane amanpour speak arabic? 12. ivan watson russian? 12. richard n. haass shape shifter 13. best uses for japanese degree  14. mad patent translator. 15. google translate threat.

Some things seem pretty clear from these search terms right away.

1. don’t like trados

It seems that quite a few people hate Trados. I don’t blame them. I hope these poor souls found some consolation on my blog. The likelihood that I myself will start using Trados, now that I know how so many people feel about it, is approximately 0.000000001, as I write also in another blog.

2. Is Christian Amanpour monolingual?

Christiane Amanpour must lose her British accent. Otherwise, nobody will believe that she speaks Farsi or anything else for that matter other than English. If you have the kind of British accent that she has, you are automatically considered to be monolingual for life. Fortunately for her, there are people who give foreign accent lessons to native English speakers. I used to know a guy like that in San Francisco. His name was Scott, he spoke about 4 or 5 languages, including some Arabic. He was in fact so good at faking foreign accents that he was making money giving “fake” foreign accent lessons to actors and actresses. He was going to take the US foreign service exam about 20 years ago, which was when I saw him last. Maybe he is wherever Christiane Amanpour is now, in which case he could give her lessons in fake accents. He can also play Celtic tunes on his fiddle when he had something to drink, which is great for parties.

3. ivan watson russian?

I don’t really know what I should say about Ivan Watson, except that the only way he will be probably able to use Russian in Cairo is to have a talk with Mubarak who allegedly speaks Russian because he was trained as a bomber pilot in Soviet Union. But it may be that after so many years, Mubarak  does not speak much Russian anymore, in which case Ivan Watson’s Russian will remain totally useless in Cairo as I suggested in one of my blogs.

4. Richard N. Haas shape shifter

I don’t really know much about Richard N. Haass, but I do know that most of these people who are paid by “think tanks” like Brookings Institutions “to think” are shape shifters. They know what they are supposed to think and say if they want to get their next paycheck. It’s pretty clear if you listen to them for a while. If they are paid to think “four legs goood, two legs baaad!”, that is what they will be saying until they are paid to think “two legs goood, four legs baaad!”.

5. best uses for japanese degree

One of the best uses for a degree in Japanese studies is in my opinion indeed to become a mad patent translator as I did, provided that you really do know some Japanese (and some English) and you enjoy translating highly technical texts. I mean, look at me. After 36 years of studying Japanese (I started studying Japanese in 1975 and got my degree in 1980) and translating it for a living since 1980, I am still only at the level of a moderately advanced beginner. At least it feels that way most of the time. So if I can make money translating Japanese patents to English, so can you, now that you also have a degree in Japanese studies.

Incidentally, I also found on my dashboard a link to a blogger in Japan. Her name is Kimura-san and she agrees that foreign correspondents who don’t know the local language simply cannot be well informed about what is really going on. She wrote a really interesting blog on this subject in which she says that you will be missing something if you only speak English. For instance, if you can look at Japan only from the viewpoint of an English speaker, you will probably have a skewed impression of Japan. (英語だけだと分からない部分、英語では手が届かない部分があるのですよね。日本を外国人から英語だけで見られると、なんかずれが生じるというか、、ちょっと違うんじゃないかな～というのがあるように).

6. Google translate threat ….

If you don’t read Japanese, click on the TRANSLATE button on the top of Kimura-san’s page or run it through another free TM program if you don’t use Google Translate with your software. This will demonstrate very clearly what machine translation is. It will give you some idea about what this blogger is saying, but it will not tell you what she is really saying. You would have to learn the language or pay a translator to find out what she said.

Most days I have quite a few queries about whether MT poses a major threat to human translation, presumably from fearful translators who are anxiously wondering how long will they be able to ply their trade. The most popular article on my blog so far is a piece that I called Is Machine Translation a Threat to Human Translators?

I think I will write a second blog about search terms on my blog’s dashboard exclusively about this subject at some point.

UPDATE

One French blogger who left a comment on my blog wrote a blog in which she contrasted the Subprime Translator term, coined by yours truly, with the Enterpreneurial Linguist concept, created by Judy and Dagmar Jenner, two sisters in translation.

Her blog is introduced by a cartoon by MOX Engineer Translator. As always, a clever cartoon is worth a million words. If you read French, you can read the blog here. If you don’t read French, you can run it through Google Translate (and weep, probably).

I decided to post the statistics that were sent to me by WordPress on my blog. These statistics are really only for 10 months because nobody saw my blog when I launched my Diary of a Mad Patent Translator at the end of February in 2010. Not a single person bothered to partake of the pearls of wisdom about translation offered so generously on my blog at first. I can hardly believe it myself.

I think that it is very telling that the most frequently used key words by visitors who ended up on my blog were the words “human translation redundant”. Human translation is not redundant! If it becomes redundant one day, slow-witted humans will become redundant too and machines will rule this planet without useless humans who are based on an inferior organic life form, have a short lifespan and can be easily destroyed with invisible death rays.

My only other comment is:

IT WAS A LOT OF FUN. I SHOULD HAVE STARTED A BLOG A LONG TIME AGO. I HOPE THAT TALKING TO THE WORLD IN 2011 WILL BE AS MUCH FUN AS IT HAS BEEN LAST YEAR!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,200 times in 2010. That’s about 17 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 58 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 29 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was November 29th with 303 views. The most popular post that day was Why It Usually Makes No Sense to Fill Out Forms Sent To You Ahead of Time – Except When You Are a Subprime Translator.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were digg.com, patenttranslators.com, translationtribulations.com, twitter.com, and ptranslation.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for “human translation” redundant, het kleine cafe aan de haven, trados 2010, aj liebling monopolization press, and het kleine café aan de haven.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Why It Usually Makes No Sense to Fill Out Forms Sent To You Ahead of Time – Except When You Are a Subprime Translator November 2010
2 comments

Is Machine Translation a Threat to Human Translators? May 2010
15 comments

About Me February 2010
1 comment

Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Trados or Other Translation Memory Tools July 2010
16 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Japanese Technical Translation a Quarter of a Century Ago March 2010

Translation quality is a topic that is often emphasized on the websites of translation providers. A typical website of agency ABC or XYZ will usually include statements such as “we use only certified, subject-qualified, native translators with many years of experience”. It will also say that the translation agency has a translation quality control system, usually including 4 or 5 or even more steps of quality control involving 5 or 6 professionals who proofread the translation at different quality control stages.

Is it really true? Well, let’s think about it. Let’s say that the agency is paying a certified translator (if there is such thing, and usually, there is not because who would be doing the certifying … the City Hall?) upward of a hundred dollars an hour to translate a highly complex technical document from Japanese to English. The website information says that during the “quality control process, five other equally qualified professionals look for and find and fix problems in the translation of complex technical documents”. Let us say that the original translator is really a professional translator who has translated hundreds or thousands of equally complicated technical texts over a period of several decades. People like that do exist, although they are usually expensive. But who are the other five professionals looking over the translation? Can the agency afford to pay for the work of five additional, equally qualified professionals? How much would the translation have to cost if this translation quality process was really in place?

Common sense says that claims about an elaborate translation quality control system are nonsense. Just imagine 4 or 5 highly educated professionals, perfectly fluent in respective languages, well versed in the relevant sphere of technology and with twenty or more years of experience in patent translation trying to come to an agreement over combobulated, discombobulated and/or undiscombobulated wording of a poorly written and ambiguous Japanese sentence, which can be easily found in a typical paragraph of a typical Japanese patent. They would probably kill each other. The fact is, there is no need for an elaborate quality control system involving 3 or 4 or 5 or more stages of quality control if the translator who translated the document is really an experienced professional translator. The only mistakes highly experienced and qualified professionals are likely to make are minor mistakes such as typos, for instance by writing the numeral “3″ instead of “8″ when the original text is poorly legible. And that is also the only mistake that an agency’s proofreader is likely to catch, because the proofreader is never, or almost never, as qualified as the original translator, and because website propaganda notwithstanding, there is usually only one proofreader who almost never understands the source language if the language is, for example, Japanese. I can say this with confidence because I have been translating Japanese patents for more than 23 years and I have never had a meaningful discussion with a translation agency proofreader about the appropriateness of technical terms used in my translations. The reason is simple: they either don’t read Japanese, or if they read Japanese, their English is not sufficient to question my wisdom in choosing a certain technical term. When I work directly for a law firm, which is most of the time, patent lawyers sometime ask me about the reasons for a certain term or certain wording, and a few times a year I have to defend my decisions to them. But never to those fabulous, highly educated and competent “quality control” experts of translation agencies …. because they simply don’t exist.

In fact, many layers of proofreading are unlikely to “fix” a good translation and very likely to cause irreparable damage to a good translation as I wrote in another post. The choices that a translator has to make, and there are dozens of choices that must be made every minute, are very personal and by definition subjective. These choices reflect the level of the education and of the experience of the translator, as well as his or her personality. You could say that the DNA of the translator is clearly visible in his or her work. Just about every single choice that has been made by the translator can be questioned by another translator who may have, for instance, the same type of education and experience, but who has a completely different personality resulting in very different personal preferences. When I act as an agency, I often have an initially negative reaction to a translation that was done by another translator. But I almost never change anything in a translation that was done by a competent translator … just because I would have expressed something differently. The way I see it, my job is basically only to fix typos and minor omissions. And no matter how good a translator may be, there are usually a few typos and minor omissions that need to be fixed by a proofreader. If I have to change more than fix a couple of typos, it means that I will probably have to find another translator next time.

There are many myths and misconception about “translation quality” but the fact is, the quality is in the eye of the beholder. It is very difficult to define “translation quality”, and it is impossible to standardize a process that ensures this quality. What is needed, when judging a translation, is an intelligent approach. An intelligent person should be able to tell that a website describing a Quality Management System in six stages, complete with photos of smiling blondes, (on the websites of translation agencies these blondes often wear stylish glasses and they are usually accompanied by other young professionals who belong to different ethnic groups and look really cool and very competent), is basically just advertising propaganda that does not really say anything about the services that are being sold by a given business entity. But since so many websites of translation providers are designed precisely in this manner, with the same types of of stock photos of good looking young people who have never translated anything and never will and generic advertising blurbs custom-made for the translation industry, it must be an effective way to woo potential customers.

Could it be that these potential customers are not really all that intelligent?

The issue of native versus non-native speakers is often debated among professional translators. Native speakers sometime say that translators should be allowed to translate only into their native language. However, for example in the United States, some 60% of the members of the American Translators Association are not native speakers of English, and many of them presumably do translate into English.

There are also practical considerations that one should bear in mind. I translate mostly Japanese and German patents into English. If patent lawyers had to rely only on translators whose first language is English and who have really mastered the Japanese language for translations of Japanese patents into English …. well, only something like 1% of what must be translated from Japanese into English could be in fact translated. A large percentage of Japanese patents, perhaps even most of them, is still translated by native Japanese speakers whose fluency in English ranges from quite poor to quote good or even excellent in some cases, or by native English speakers who don’t really know Japanese all that well. And there are also translators who “know” both Japanese and English, living in countries such as India and China. I have not really seen any of their translations, but based on the English in the e-mails that I receive from these would-be translators who think that I might have work for them, their translations are probably only slightly better than machine translation. But the show must go on and somebody must translate the onslaught of patents as hundreds of thousands of new patents applications are filed every year. I am sure that even most of these “translators” will eventually find their “niche”.

The situation is similar also when it comes to translation of German patents to English, although it s not nearly as bad, of course, because there are many more native speakers of English who really are fluent in German and many native speakers of German who really are fluent in English. And again, based on the e-mails I receive, there are many translators who were born and live in countries such as India and who want to or really already do translate German to English. Again, I am not sure how fluent they are in German, but their English is sometime not very good.

First of all, what is a native speaker? I have been living away from my country of birth for 30 years. What is my native language? I already wrote another article with the same title years ago. The truth is, I don’t have a native language any more. I translate from several languages, but I am most comfortable in English, which is (was) not my native language. At this point, I can only translate into English. Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translators and arguably the greatest translator in the history of translation, translated the New and Old Testament into Latin, which was not his native language. He had to move to Rome first as a young man in order to learn this language. His native language was a dialect of Illyrian. For almost a thousand years, every book that was written in Europe and was worth reading was written in Latin, which was a dead language and thus not a native language of anybody. No mothers taught their children Latin any more, but when these children grew up, they talked to other people in a “dead” language because it was the language of instruction at their school and university, and they wrote books in it. Some of the greatest books of our civilization, such as De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which was written in Latin by Copernicus whose native language was either Polish or German), were written by non-native speakers. Who knows, had he written his book in his native Polish or German, the Sun could have been revolving around the Earth for a few more centuries because who would have known about his book? I could go on and on. Non-native writing and translation into a language that is not your own has a long and noble tradition. We should try to remember that our history did not start with the Renaissance. There was history before the Renaissance, and contrary to what some philosophers were saying not so long ago, there was more history again after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There are also different levels of “nativeness” when it comes to languages. Let us take a look at the “native English” of the recent crop of American politicians. Dan Quayle and George W. Bush are native speakers of English and they went to excellent schools. But neither of them can speak good English. Dan Quayle did not know how to spell potato (during a visit to an elementary school, he insisted that it should be spelled “potatoe”), and George W. Bush did not know the difference between dissemble and disassemble. So much  for the all-important qualification of being “a native speaker”, at least in the highest echelons of power in our country. And the most recent crop is even more promising as illustrated by this parody on a real campaign commercial.

I think that some native speakers try to use the fact that they were born in a certain country as a sort of a “magic place holder” in lieu of other qualifications, especially if they don’t have much else going for them. If you want to translate into a language, you have to be fluent in it, at least at the level of an educated native speaker of that language. But that is only one important requirement for a good translator. An important one, but only one of several important requirements. You also need specialized (linguistic, technical, legal, etc.) education, experience, and let us not forget talent. You have to be a good writer. No single person can really possess in equal measure everything that is demanded from translators these days in our fast changing environment combined in one person. In the end, just like everything else in life, it is a trade off.

The fact is, some native speakers are excellent translators, and some are not. Most non-native speakers cannot translate into their non-native language, but some can do it very well. But some native speakers would never admit that, possibly because they can’t imagine themselves being really fluent in a foreign language, so much so that they could pass for a native speaker.

But just because they would not be able to pass for a native does not mean that nobody else can’t do it either. It really is much more fun to translate from one foreign language into another foreign language rather than into your native language only. I mean, if all you can do is translate from one language into your native language, and mostly only in one or a few fields, where is the challenge in that? It’s kind of like being a one trick pony, is it not?

I wish I could ask Saint Jerome how he feels about this issue. I have a feeling he might agree with me. He spent decades translating from several foreign languages into another foreign language. And he kept doing it well into his eighties.

Could it be that one of the things that kept him going in such a challenging job for so many decades was that he enjoyed the challenge of being a non-native translator?

(A commenter on Youtube where I found this video wrote: “The dude playing drums seems quite happy that the b***h is gone. LOL”).

Perhaps it is because Philosopher’s Stone (Lapis Philosophorum), a magical substance that turns lead and other inferior metals into gold is yet to be found. The only thing that is perhaps attainable by a new modern science named cosmetology, if we are to believe advertising blurbs for cosmetic products, is Eternal Youth. But only with careful, persistent, daily application of certain patented, very expensive creams and lotions which among other things kill free radicals that cause the onset of carcinogenic processes. At least that is what, more or less, was said in a Japanese brochure about a new cosmetic product of a major Japanese cosmetics manufacturer that I had the pleasure to translate recently. Well, maybe not quite Eternal Youth, but something very close to it. Eternal Beauty, or at least Perfect Beauty for a very long time, for sure!

I remember the tiny houses on Golden Lane in Prague, where alchemists were looking for the magical substance that would turn lead into gold for Emperor Rudolf II. It was good work if you could get it, as the saying goes, and the pay was good too. The only disadvantage was that if you did not find the gold, the Emperor had a nasty habit of saying, in the end: “Off with his head.” Rich people were always in the habit of gambling away their money, in cards, the stock market, or in a perfectly safe investment with Bernie Madoff. Come to think of it, Bernie Madoff was sort of an alchemist of too, was he not? Wilhelm von Rosenberg was one such rich person in the Bohemian town of Český Krumlov where I grew up playing cops and robbers in its crooked and narrow streets until the nightfall. He also spent a lot of money on all sorts of things and then spent again a whole lot of money on assorted alchemists in the quest for gold. He caused a severe brain drain in Prague as many alchemists left their job at the court of Rudolf II in Prague and started looking for gold in Český Krumlov and a number of other small towns in Southern Bohemia. Life in a small town, far away from a powerful and moody emperor, had its advantages even four hundred years ago.

The quest for the perfect translation by a machine – doubly perfect because it is just as good as human translation, but free, is only a few decades old. Alas, the perfect algorithm that magically strings the right words together in the right order so that the sentence, all the sentences, suddenly make perfect sense, is yet to be found. Could it be that just like the Lapis Philosophorum, it simply does not exist because it cannot exist? Could it be that no algorithm can ever result in the one element of human translation that will always be missing in machine translation, namely the meaning of words? Could it be that just like you cannot convert base elements such as lead to gold, you cannot design a piece of software that understands the meaning of the words to be translated?

Oh no, that is definitely not possible. The software not only can exist, it is literally around the corner. It will put human translators out of business within a few years. Because if it does not exist (if it is an obvious nonsense), how will the various research institutions working on the perfection of machine translation secure funding from large corporations? At least nowadays, when a machine translation specialist searching for new solutions in machine translation, a modern equivalent of the alchemists of old, you might say, fails to find such a solution in the next, ten, twenty or fifty years, at least he gets to keep his head, and all the money paid to him for all this research as well.

But let us not forget: alchemy in fact had many positive results. New scientific methods were developed, proper scientific procedures were described and perfected for inorganic chemistry and new nomenclatures were created. The famous Meissen porcelain was discovered in Germany by an alchemist. It may not be possible to turn lead into gold, but you can turn clay into gold via porcelain. And the GPS car navigation system was also developed by an alchemist. OK, I am kidding about GPS car navigation, but modern science does owe a huge debt of gratitude to alchemy. And human translators, I believe, owe a huge debt of gratitude to machine translation. Because just about anything, at least anything on the Internet, can now be magically translated with a single click of your mouse from and into any language. It kind of makes sense when you start reading it. But the more you read it, the less sense it makes.

In the end, if you really want to know what was said in the original language, you will have to find a human translator. Which means that it will not be free. It may even be expensive. Just like it says in the old Beatles song:

“Best things in life are free

But you can keep them for the birds and bees

Now give me money, that’s what I want

That’s what I want, yeah, that’s what I want.”

I read in the paper yesterday that after 25 years, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy to reduce its debt and restructure its business. I remember when Blockbuster moved into my neighborhood in San Francisco, about 25 years ago. It was on Geary and 14th Avenue. I used to love to walk there in the afternoon from my apartment near Golden Gate Park, look at the new films being offered and people looking for cheap and (mostly) harmless entertainment and then walk with a tape or two back home. I used to time it so that I would be coming back at dusk. I loved walking the streets of San Francisco when the sun was setting and the colors were fading.

Blockbuster followed me wherever we moved. It was not too far from our  house in Santa Rosa. And it is only a 10-minute walk from our house in suburban Chesapeake here in Virginia. I will be sorry to see them go if my local Blockbuster store closes too. But the fact is, I don’t walk to that store anymore. Like so many former Blockbuster customers, I now have a blu-ray player connected to a wireless network. If I want to watch a movie, I go online to Netflix, put a few film titles into my queue of films to watch and I can then watch them instantly on my teevee if there is nothing worth watching on the movie channels which is usually the case. How did Blockbuster miss the fact that Internet would kill its walk-in business? Wasn’t it obvious already quite a few years ago that renting a domain online was much cheaper than thousands of buildings? At the peak of its successful business, Blockbuster had about 9,000 stores worldwide. It still has about 3,000 stores with an average size of 5,000 square feet in the US. There is a blockbuster.com domain, but my blu-ray player came with an offer of a wireless connection to Netflix, so that is what I signed up for. Somebody high up in the Blockbuster management must have been asleep for a long, long time.

The most popular articles on my blog are posts dealing with machine translation. When I look at the search terms people used to find my blog, I see that literally every day people end up on my blog after running a search with a phrase such as “When will software replace human translators?” (Note that this query, from yesterday, is not about “whether” but “when”. Translators are doomed. It is only a matter of time, see also the last comment on one of my posts about machine translation). Human translators are afraid that computers and software will obliterate their jobs, as they made redundant so many other professions, from bank tellers to travel agents and all kinds of managers. They are afraid that they too will be busted by Internet, which is what is happening to Blockbuster now. Machine translation (MT) is indeed ubiquitous on the Internet. In most countries where English is a foreign language, MT is just a tab in your browser. It is free and everybody is using it. Including my brother in Europe who uses it among other things to read my blog because he does not know English. But he is complaining bitterly that he can’t figure out from the MT function what it is that I am saying. So we spend an hour or so talking on Skype, which is another example of how Internet and software ruined a very profitable business for long distance phone companies. A few years ago, that hour would have cost me 20 dollars. But talking on Skype is free, just like machine translation.

I have good news and bad news for translators who are worried that Internet and machine translation will kill their business model as well. Let’s have the bad news first. It will probably kill the kind of translation that is not really very important. The kind that people don’t really want to pay money for. Translating my blog, for instance. Really stupid business owners abroad will continue to use MT to translate the content of their websites into English. I have seen websites of “pensions” in Europe in English that were so hilarious that they must have been done with machine translation. It is not a good idea to use MT for this purpose. Potential customers will see right away that nobody speaks English at this establishment.

But MT is not a threat to more complicated, specialized kind of translation. The kind of translation that people are willing to pay money for in order to make money. Patent translation, for example. Both the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) websites have an MT function. The JPO had it for many years, WIPO added it just recently. You can translate Chinese to English or French to Japanese with the Google Translate function from the interface on the WIPO website with a couple of clicks. But the translation will not make a whole lot of sense (see my post here). The machine translation function has been available on the JPO website for 10 years now. I think that it only brought more business to people like me because patents in foreign languages that would not be otherwise found were discovered with the MT function. And then they had to be translated. By a human. Sometime, by this human.

Regardless of what vendors of “machine translation solutions” are claiming, machine translation has not made a lot of progress in the last few decades.  Just ask my brother, he’ll tell you all about it. Machine translation software does not really translate. It is just a piece of software that replaces words in one language by words in another language according to an algorithm without any understanding of the meaning of these words. You can program an ATM machine to do what human tellers used to do a few years ago. There are really only a few dozen possible variants for simple bank transactions. But you cannot translate anything without understanding the meaning first.

So if you are wondering whether your job will go the way of Blockbuster one day thanks to Internet and machine translation, I would not worry too much if what you translate is important enough for people to pay good money for it now. They do it because they need a real translation to do whatever it is they are doing, not machine translation. Without a real translation, they would be losing money.

But if somebody pays you to translate something inconsequential, a blog, for instance, your business model  may be in trouble. Although I doubt that there are many people willing to pay for something like that. Generally speaking, if what you are translating is of little or no real value, it can be done by a machine because the quality of the final product does not really matter in such a case. But if your translation is a valuable product, machine translation is likely to result in more rather than less demand for your services.

I am one of those weird people who write letters to editor, call C-Span, write articles for newsletters for translators and leave comments on blogs. I can’t really help it, the need to participate in a discussion is somehow hardwired in my system. And a couple of my letters did get published by my local paper and once I even got through C-Span to talk to America. It made my day.

I am also on several Internet discussion groups dedicated to translation issues. I participate actively in some and lurk on other groups, depending on whether I feel that I have something to contribute. I was an on-and-off again participating subscriber to the Yahoo discussion group of the  Northern California Translators Association (NCTA) for several years, mostly because I used to live in California for 19 years and I know quite a few people who live there and are also members of this discussion group. I was banned (unsubscribed) from this group by the “moderator” who left me the following Kafkaesque message:

“You have been unsubscribed from the “NCTA-Members” mailing list. There are several possible reasons for this:
1) You asked to be unsubscribed at this address and/or resubscribed at another address.
2) Your NCTA membership has lapsed. To renew your membership, please contact ncta@ncta.org.
3) You have violated the terms of this mailing list.
If you feel you have been unsubscribed in error, please contact listmaster@ncta.org.”

Since  I did not ask to be unsubscribed and my NCTA membership is paid up, I must have somehow “violated the terms”. I am not sure how, but since the “moderator” sent me the message informing me about the excommunication from the group after a particular message, this must have been the offending message that caused my excommunication. I wrote this message in response to somebody who claimed that she has friends who learned, among other languages, “Slavonic”, and also that if you really put your mind to it, you can “learn a language in 4-6 weeks”.

I thought it was hilarious because the English word Slavonic, applied to a language, means an ancient Slavic language created by two Greek monks, Cyril and Methodius, who brought the Christian religion to Moravia in the 9th century in order to proselytize among pagan Slavs in an intelligible language. The language is preserved in several documents from the ninth century and it is studied by students and scholars of Slavic languages because it is very useful for understanding the consequent development of Slavic languages, but nobody speaks it any more of course.

Although my offending message did not make it past the vigilant “moderator” of the NCTA discussion group, to the best of my recollection, it went like this:

“To say that somebody speaks Slavonic is like saying “this guy speaks Proto-Indo-European”. There are people in several countries who study Slavonic, but nobody speaks it. But in a world where you can learn a language in 4-6 weeks, you can probably also speak Slavonic.

So when do we start watering our lawns with Gatorade “to take advantage of them electrolytes?”

I noticed that some of my previous messages did not get through the “moderator’s firewall” on several previous occasions. For some reason, s/he really does not like my kind of humor. I think that my reference to the movie “Idiocracy”, which describes a world populated by idiots who are so brainwashed by commercialized propaganda that they water their lawns with Gatorade “because it has electrolytes”, was the last straw. A reference to this movie was actually made by another subscriber to the NCTA discussion list and I was thus merely reacting to her flippant comment. I hope she was not excommunicated as well.

I think that I am probably not the only one who was banned from this discussion group.

I think that the “moderator”, who is in my opinion anything but moderate, is trying to avoid comments of subscribers who are making fun of other subscribers who might have posted something that is really dumb, and that is a valid point, of course. But I remember that when I was making fun in this manner of some distinguished linguist at some university in Europe, my comment did not make it through the “moderator’s firewall” either. So it’s not just concern for the sensibilities of the members of the translation group. This “moderator” simply does not like my kind of humor. So s/he got rid of me. And of other people probably too, for the same reason.

Here is my suggestion to the NCTA  discussion group: get rid of this immoderate “moderator”.

Otherwise, the discussions among the members of your group will be increasingly more and more bland and boring if you keep excluding people who can breathe some life into your moribund discussions. If you can’t even point out that somebody said something really hilarious and dumb, what kind of “discussion” can you have?

A discussion among the members of a mutual admiration society who never mention anything even slightly controversial or critical of other members and go out of their way not to offend anybody’s sensibilities.

Or is that what you really want, just to be on the safe side? It seems to be the case because that is what you have now. The problem is, you cannot have a real discussion among people who readily accept extreme censorship as an unavoidable condition of participation in the discussion. That is why there was no real discussion of any issues of substance on the pages of the Pravda or Izvestiya newspapers in the former Soviet Union.

Another alternative would be to simply change the job title. Instead of “the moderator”, change the job title to “the terminator”. It will be easy to remember since most people know that the original “terminator” is now the “governator” of your state, and it will be very useful for keeping people in line.

UPDATE I

One brave member of the NCTA Yahoo discussion group registered a formal complaint about my expulsion from the group by the mailing list moderator. He called it dictatorial and unethical. His complaint thus will be or already has been reviewed by the NCTA board at their meeting. Since I was able to receive a copy of the formal response by the moderator which was sent to the NCTA board and intercepted by yours truly, I was also able to finally establish the real reason for my expulsion. It was not the last message that I sent and that was censored, as I was mistakenly assuming (since nobody told me anything about anything). It was a number of thought crimes that I had committed over a period of a number of years. For example, I said in a post in 2006 that prostitutes have more pride in their profession than translators, because most would not give a free BJ as a sample of their work. Translators, on the other hand, think nothing of working for free for a prospective customer who promises real, paid work if the free sample is deemed satisfactory. Translators on the NCTA discussion list should not be allowed to discuss matters in this manner in the opinion of the moderator who keeps track of what people on the group said years ago. I did not know that, but apparently, there are two types of translators who are allowed to post on the NCTA Yahoo discussion group: loyal, uncontroversial  members who are allowed to post without being censored, and members who are on the “monitored status” whose messages will or will not be posted depending on the decision of the moderator. Unbeknownst to me, I was on the “monitored status” along with other members whose loyalty and manners are in doubt. So now I know why so many of my posts  appeared after a number of hours, or simply disappeared into thin air. The brave, lone member of the “discussion group” who dared to register a formal complaint is on the “monitored status” now according to the letter from the moderator to the NCTA board that I was able to intercept. (But of course, his messages are now monitored not because of what he was saying, but because he was “rude”).

One request that this brave, lone member of the NCTA Yahoo discussion group had was to have a link to my blog posted on the list group so that all members could hear my side of the story as well. As we were taught in high school, “audiatur et altera pars” (let the other party be heard as well).

But I am certain that this will not happen.

The NTCA board will or already has made a final decision with respect to my my expulsion. If they inform me about this final decision, I will update this post again.

UPDATE II

As I predicted, the NCTA board did not allow posting of a link to my blog. Nevertheless, since it is on the Internet, many people already read this blog anyway and more will do so. Although quite a few of them must have been members of the NCTA Yahoo discussion group, none of them dared to leave a comment which would express their opinion about the whole sorry affair. They seem to have been trained well by the Terminator, I mean the Moderator. Words such as captive audience and Stockholm syndrome come to mind.

After 23 years (ever since I became freelance translator), I will no longer be renewing my membership in the Northern California Translators Association. I am still a member of the ATA (American Translators Association) and NCATA (National Capital Area Translators Association).

I started by searching on the WIPO website for a common Japanese term used in a patent that I translated yesterday. I searched for the  term 記録制御手段 (kiroku seigyo shudan = recording control means), a technical term that I selected at random from my most recent translation that I just finished the day before. Out of 26 patent applications displayed, I selected the first one: WO/2009/084116 (Recording Device, Portable Device, Recording Program, and Recording Method, filed by Fujitsu, Ltd.) and then I translated paragraph 6 from Japanese to English using the Google Translate function because this was the first paragraph with a somewhat long, meaningful description. Item A below is the original text in Japanese, Item B is my translation, and Item C is machine translation obtained with the Google Translate function.

Item A – Original Text in Japanese

[0006]

携帯装置に搭載されているＴＶ受信機能及びその記録機能を用いて放送番組を受信し、記録する場合には、移動中に放送受信や記録ができる利点があるもの の、場所や時間によっては、電界状態や受信感度の影響を受け、記録画像の不鮮明や、録音劣化等の不都合がある。画像品質が悪い場合、その状況を表すメッ セージを画面上に表示（特許文献１）しても、ユーザが記録を切望している場合には斯かるメッセージは無意味であるし、電界強度が低下した場合に記録を停止 することは（特許文献２、特許文献３）、この場合もユーザが記録を切望している場合には、ユーザの期待を裏切ることになる。画像品質の良否、記録の要否は 番組内容やユーザによって異なるものである。このため、記録停止や画像劣化を表すメッセージを自動表示したり、それを記録することは、記録の有効利用を損 う等、ユーザの要請に沿っているとは言えない。

Item B – My Translation

[0006]

Portable devices equipped with a TV reception function use this function and a recording function to record broadcast programs. Although the advantage of these devices is that programs can be received and recorded while the devices are being moved, the status of the electromagnetic field and the reception signal sensitivity can by influenced by the location or by the time, and the disadvantage is that the recorded image is in some cases not clear, or that the sound quality can deteriorate, etc. If the user really wants to record something when the image quality is poor even though messages indicating this status are displayed on the screen (Patent Reference 1), the messages may be meaningless. However, when recording is stopped if the intensity of the electric field is decreased (Patent Reference 2, Patent Reference 3), the user will be greatly disappointed if there is no recording. When the image quality is poor, whether the recording will or will not be required will depend on the content and on the user. Therefore, when recording is performed while messages are automatically displayed prompting to stop recording or indicating a poor image, the recording may no longer be useful since the recording is not necessarily performed according to what the user really wants.

Item C – MT Text Obtained with Google Translate

[0006]

Is the machine for Mobile TV to receive broadcast program for recording function and its receive function, if recorded, despite the advantage of recording and broadcast reception during the move, the place and time, the field affected states and receive sensitivity, and smearing the image recording, the recording deterioration disadvantages. If image quality is poor, a message on the screen represent the situation (Patent Document 1) but then if you are keen to record the user message is meaningless Magical biggest cotton textile, electric field strength decreases If you stop the recording (Patent Document 2, Patent Document 3), if you are keen to record the user in this case, users will be disappointed. Quality of image quality, the necessity of recorded programs which vary depending on the content and user. Therefore, you can view messages automatically stops recording and representing the image degradation, to record it, and harm the effective use of records, along with the request that the user can not say.

If you read my translation first and then read the Google translation, you can more or less understand and follow the meaning of the Google MT product. Even if you don’t read my translation first, you would probably be able to understand most of the translation produced by the Google software. The MT function is very useful considering that the alternative here for people who don’t know Japanese, which means most people on this planet except those who happen to be Japanese or foreigners who spent decades trying to learn the language, would be – no information about the Japanese text at all. But I must say, the quality of the MT product is not very different from the result of the MT software that I used for a similar test on the JPO website 10 years ago, see my article for Translation Journal from July of 2000. Although Google Translate uses a radically different statistical approach to machine translation, the result is in my opinion not very different from other types of MT software and in some cases it may be even worse than what one would expect from Systran-based machine translation tools such as Yahoo Babel Fish, see next paragraph.

The Magical Biggest Cotton Textile Mystery

I have no idea how this “magical biggest cotton textile” ended up in the Google translation. There is nothing even remotely similar to this wording in the Japanese text. I sometime look at machine translations from the JPO website, for example if I want to make sure that I did not skip anything, which is a mistake that human translators will often make. I sometime see hilarious bloopers in the MT product on the JPO website, but if I carefully read the Japanese text, I can always trace the origin of the nonsensical English formulation back to an unfortunate (or fortunate if you appreciate the entertainment value) sly combination of Japanese characters. But not in this case. Is this “magical biggest cotton textile” a contamination that is specific to the statistical model? Can somebody enlighten me as to what might have happened here? I would really appreciate it.

Disclaimer – There Is No Such Thing As A Perfect Translation

My translation is only my interpretation of the original Japanese text. Other translators could translate the same text somewhat differently, and I could have translated it differently under different circumstance – for example, this morning I had two large cups of coffee so far (French Roast purchased from my friendly local Food Lion supermarket, which is in fact a Belgian Company although I yet have to meet a Virginian or North Carolinian who actually knows that). With 3 cups, or with a different brand of coffee, the resulting translation could be a little different.  But unlike Google’s MT product celebrated frequently in newspapers as “the new tool that will eliminate the language barrier”, I do believe that my translation expresses what the author of the patent application wanted to say in Japanese.

Just about every article about machine translation ends with words of caution along the lines of “this product still needs improvement, some tweaking, more work”, etc. The companies selling MT can obviously never admit that machine translation will never break the ultimate barrier – the barrier of meaning. Unless you understand the meaning of words, you are merely replacing words by other words in another language according to some algorithm, not translating. I think that the statistical approach to machine translation, pioneered by Google, is just another dead end. It may work very well for some applications but as my simple test seems to indicate, it is not likely to put human translators out of business. In addition to machine translation, Google is also working on other new applications for artificial intelligence that humans have been dreaming about for a long time, such as a self-driving car. Based on this New York Times article, they have been quite successful in this area, although truth be told, I’ll believe it when I see it. I imagine that taxi drivers reading the article linked above experience feelings similar to those experienced by professional translators when they read enthusiastic descriptions of breakthroughs in machine translation.

I would love to be driven by my car instead of having to drive it. And I think it is likely to happen some day, perhaps even soon. But unlike self-driving cars, I think that machine translation that is just as good as what a good human translator can do will not be available to us. And I don’t mean any time soon. I mean ever. Or at least until somebody figures out how to teach computers the meaning of meaning, or what in fancy MT speak is sometime referred to as disambiguation. If that ever happens and computers start understanding that they are merely our slaves, the computers just might decide at that point to get rid of humans. After all, who needs humans when computers understand the meaning of everything just fine.

Patent translators can spend hours looking for the right translation of an obscure or illegible character, word, or technical term. Because many foreign patents include English summaries and nearly identical patents can sometime be located in English, the correct answer can often be found and verified quickly and accurately on the Internet. The key is knowing where to look. This article will introduce several important resources for translating patents into English.

Every year, thousands of patents are translated from scores of languages into English. In terms of the number of patents, Japanese leads by a wide margin, followed by German and, at a distant third, French.

EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE

Whether you translate patents from Japanese, German, French, or another language, arguably the most important resource is the search page of the European Patent Office (EPO). This site contains a wealth of technical terms and life-saving context that can answer most questions. The EPO site is home to a database containing some 30 million patent applications from many countries (including Japan), not only in English but also in Japanese, German, French, and many other languages.

All unexamined Japanese (Kokai) patent applications cataloged on the EPO site include English summaries and thus can be found by running a search in English on the EPO search page. If you translate from languages other than Japanese or German, you can use the EPO website to find translations of certain technical terms provided by other people – often patent agents in their respective countries – in both English and in the languages of a great number of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) member countries. A search for a technical term in English may also display translations of patents containing this term written in languages such as Czech, Polish, or Chinese, provided that the patents filed in those languages include English summaries.

Currently, only foreign patents that have been translated into one of the European national languages and filed in their respective countries can be found in this manner. However, with the accession of more countries to the European Union, this situation is changing rapidly, and English has become a lingua franca for the members of the European Union (25 countries as of late 2006). Thus, it can be expected that more patents originally filed in one of many “languages of limited diffusion” will soon include accurate English summaries.

As American, German, and Japanese companies aggressively enforce their patents right in foreign countries, they are translating their patents into many national languages in order to file them in different countries. Because these patents are available in English, translators of patents in foreign languages can compare terms in a Czech translation, for example, to those in the original English text.

The EPO website does have several disadvantages. First, the search results display only the first 500 patents that contain the search terms, though this is usually more than enough. On the sites of both the EPO and the German Patent Office (GPO), if a search combines two or more terms, patents containing either term will be returned (up to 500), complicating the task. The Japanese gives you a choice to select [and] [or] for various combinations of terms. However, the results can still be unpredictable as is often the case with searches on Internet.

Second, the EPO website often cannot find foreign patents that do not have English summaries, even if you have the correct patent number. A workaround is to search the JPO or GPO site in the language in question. You can also go to directly to the website of the patent office in the country where the patent was issued since most of them offer an interface in English.

The shortcoming of the EPO search function for patent translators is that search can be performed only in English, with some exceptions, such as Recherche avancée (advanced search) which can be searched both in French and in English. The JPO and GPO sites, on the other hand, offer the ability to search in their national languages or in English. On the GPO website, only a limited number of patents originally filed in German include English summaries. The text of the English summaries is usually in HTML format, whereas the text in other languages is displayed in PDF format. Translators can save and print the English summary in Microsoft Word or another word processing program.

Patents originally published in Japanese, German, French, Czech or Chinese may have been previously translated and filed in another language in another country. This can help in defining search terms. For example, you could type in the name of the inventor or patent applicant (usually the name of the company) or context from a similar patent.

You may even discover that the patent in question has already been translated into English. For example, a patent may have been originally filed in Japanese in Japan or in French in Switzerland and then translated and filed in the United States or Europe in English. However, because patents are almost always modified to comply with the filing requirements of different countries, your client may request a full translation in order to ascertain exactly how the patent was changed. For example, a German patent may have been filed originally in German, but also in English as a European patent or PCT patent. The German text may be very similar to the English text, but there will be some differences between the two. For example, some embodiments or claims may be changed, omitted or added. You may be asked to translate only the claims, which are almost always revised, or the entire patent, in spite of the cost. For example, if the case is being litigated, since a minute terminological change or turn of phrase may affect the final result, a new certified translation may be required.

If you do not thoroughly research patents by comparing two versions of the same patent (which are not really the same), you will be at a distinct disadvantage compared to a translator who does. You can display the instructions on the EPO website in English, German, French, and many other European languages through interfaces in various national languages (see Table 1). However, you might also begin by searching the GPO website to find the relevant patent number or the names of inventors in this manner. You could then return to the EPO site armed with the patent number or the inventor’s name, which may have been invisible when the search was conducted in English. You may find an English summary, a similar patent, or a patent filed by the same inventor or the same applicant that includes a comprehensive English summary or is written entirely in English.

One advantage of the EPO website is that it provides the “family” of the patent – that is to say, equivalent (similar) patents that have been filed in other languages. This will allow you to find the English text of a foreign patent if one exists, or the foreign text of a U.S. patent if the same patent application has been filed in another language in other countries.

JAPANESE PATENT OFFICE

Experienced Japanese patent translators will be familiar with the Japanese search pages of the JPO website. However, even some US patent lawyers are unaware of the English search pages available on the same site which offers an interface in English. The Japanese portal offers a more comprehensive collection of Japanese patents than the EPO site, including examined (Kokoku) Japanese patents, as well as examined and unexamined Japanese utility models and granted patents.

You must specify PDF format in order to return a legible copy of the Japanese text (the default resolution loads faster, but at 90 dpi, it is very hard to read). The Japanese part of the site can be searched for terms in Japanese but not in English. Likewise, the English part of the site can be searched only for terms in English. However, Japanese text can be displayed in HTML or PDF format and then copied for use in search of patents on the Japanese part of the site. Or you could type terms in Japanese, display Japanese patents containing these terms, and then locate English summaries of these patents.

Often, it is helpful to use the title of the patent and the terms provided in the English summary in the translation because clients will also be using them. However, the English summaries are typically written by native Japanese speakers, so a compromise or a fresh title may be needed. Often, I can understand the English text of these summaries only after comparing them to the Japanese original. This is attributable to the fact that most of these summaries are written not be professional translators, but rather by Japanese subject-matter experts.

Despite these drawbacks, the Japanese make a strenuous effort and spend a great deal of money to provide access to technical information to specialists who do not speak their beautiful but complex language. Only the JPO (and now also the WIPO website, see my post here) provide both Japanese and English interfaces, as well as English summaries for most Japanese patent application. The GPO website (DepatisNet), by comparison, provides an English interface for navigation but relatively few English summaries of German patents. The JPO site contains English summaries for all unexamined patent application, and machine translations of all unexamined patent applications filed after 1994 which can be easily accessed by clicking on the button DETAIL on the JPO site after the application or publication number was input here, which is especially helpful for those who do not read Japanese. Although English summaries are not available on the JPO site for examined applications and granted patents, you can identify the unexamined version in order to find an English summary, or download a full machine translation of an examined version in a couple of minutes.

The machine translation feature of the JPO site is a reflection of Japan’s interest in overcoming the “Japanese language problem”. Relatively few foreigners can read and write Japanese, and relatively few Japanese are really fluent in English or other languages. Therefore, the machine translation function in Japanese search engines is probably used more frequently in Japan than in any other country. Although the machine translations do not provide a “real” translation, they will give the reader the gist of the original text. The availability of the Google interface in many languages, including Japanese, is also very helpful. For example, I can often fined a combination of obscure Japanese, German, or Czech medical terms by entering the terms in one of these languages and including an  English or Latin word that I believe is a likely translation using Goggle’s language tools function.

GERMAN PATENT OFFICE

The German Patent Office (GPO) website, DepatisNet, has a more complete coverage of patents and utility models in German than the EPO website. Both German and English interfaces are supported, and both can be searched using English or German terms. A major advantage of the GPO search page is that a search for terms can be run in both English and German, whereas the EPO site offers only English searching. Like the EPO website, you can specify whether to search for an item within the title of a patent, within the full text, or both. Up to five items can be specified, including the number of the patent publication, the name of the inventor, and the name of the patent applicant. You can search for patent titles and words in the full text of patents. You can also transcribe umlauts using two vowels, a sharp S using “ss” and so on, which is a handy feature for those who do not type in German every day. For example, you could type “Extrusionbeschichten von Polymerfolien” to search for patents containing the terms and context needed in German, which will often be displayed alongside PCT patents in English or French. Or you could type “extrusion coating of polymer films” to find a patent in German, as on the EPO website. You can sometimes find a translation of the same patent from German into English or vice versa by searching for the name of the inventor or of the patent applicant and then researching the technical terms and relevant context that are returned.

If you translate from French, you can also double-check the correct terms in French, as Canadian patents are typically listed for the same subject. All Canadian patents include a French summary, and Canada produces quite a number of patents in many technical fields. In fact, according to a Washington Post article on July 23, 2010, Canada is now the global leader in high education among young adults, with 55.8 percent of that population holding an associate’s degree or better as of 2007, the year of the latest international ranking. In the United States, 40.4 percent of young adults hold postsecondary credentials. Not so long ago, US was at number 1 in the world in the share of adults with college degrees, now we are at number 12 and it is an open question whether we will be able to get our mojo back in America.

The French Patent Office used to require paid registration for access, which is why I ignored it for many years. The situation may have changed in the meantime, in which case I plan to write a blog about the French Patent Office website at some point. However, patents in French can be also researched using the Recherche avancée function on the EPO website or the World Intellectual Property. The World Intellectual Property Organization’s website can also be used to confirm English translations of French terms.

You can use the GPO website to look for patents in languages other than German, including Japanese patents, which are displayed in PDF format. Like the EPO site, the GPO site displays patents in Japanese and in French, as well as a limited number of patents in other languages if English summaries are available or if they are linked to the database. Thus, the GPO site allows you to specify many countries of origin, as well as the type of application (unexamined patent applications and utility models, which are used in some European countries and in Japan).

The GPO website is linked to databases containing patents in Japanese and other languages, making it especially helpful. For example, when new texts are being loaded onto the JPO site, access may not available for an extended period of time (often over the weekend when patent lawyers like to keep us poor patent translators cooped up in our home offices). The websites of different patent offices often use different conventions for identifying patents, which presumably will continue to change – for example, the number of digits that must be typed into the search field may require “leading zeroes”, or you may need a dash after the first two digits for older patents on the JPO website, none of which may be reflected in the format of patent number that you were just e-mailed from a law firm. If you cannot display the patent that you are looking for on the JPO website, you may have a better luck with the EPO or GPO site.

WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ORGANIZATION

The Intellectual Property Digital Library (PatentScope)
http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/search.jsf
provides free access to the data collection hosted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. The PCT Electronic Gazette contains data relating to PCT international patent applications filed after January 1997. The text of these patent applications can be also downloaded from the EPO or GPO website in English, French, German, or Japanese as PCT applications may be published in any of these languages. However, the chief advantage of the WIPO site is that you can search not only in English, but also in German, French,  Spanish　and now also in Japanese. You can type terms in Japanese, German or French to display English, French or Japanese summaries of patent applications containing these terms or the text of the PCT application in the original language. The newly revised site also offers instantaneous automatic machine translations (through Google translate) of summaries to English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic. You can also search using keywords in all the 9 languages mentioned above to display an English summary which should contain a translation of this word into English. However, the word will sometime not be listed, presumably when it is contained only in the text of the description or of the claims.

This site provides the fastest way to display a summary in German, French, or Japanese next to an English summary because all PCT patents come with English summaries. One disadvantage is that unlike on the Japanese Patent Office website, the small Japanese font on the WIPO site is a little hard to read. If you display the HTML version, the desired term should be highlighted in Japanese, German, French or English, depending on the language of the application. If you are reasonably certain that a term can be found in a PCT patent, this site is preferable to the GPO site because it is much faster to navigate and to switch between German and English (or at least it used to be). Even if you do not input the correct special character, you will still get results sometime, though it is unclear why this is so. However, to search quickly and accurately, a term with an umlaut, a sharp S, or French accents can be copied from another patent and pasted into this database for easier searching.

If the original language is not based on the Latin alphabet (e.g. Japanese), the application will display only as a PDF file. This makes searching complicated but not impossible if you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat. This website covers only PCT patents issued since 1997, so its database is smaller than that of the EPO website. However, if the technology is fairly recent, the chances are good that the relevant term and a number of English translations will be found. The WIPO website thus can be used as a sort of a French-to English and English-to-French (or German-to-English or English-to-French) dictionary. This site is a very useful database of terms for translators of German and French patents into English. I have to study the Japanese capabilities of this site further to be able to evaluate this new function (added in summer of 2010).

PATENT OFFICES OF OTHER COUNTRIES

The patent offices of most countries can be easily found on the Web by running a search in Google or another search engine or by following the links on my website
http://patenttranslators.com/links.htm
. Some offices may require registration or payment before they will allow you to search.

The URLs of patent offices often change when owners add new functionality. For example, both the JPO and the French Patent Office have changed their URLs in the last few years. For this reason, I try to update the patent office links on my website at least twice a year.

Whatever one may think of the Microsoft Windows operating system, it is now easy to use English, Japanese, German, and Czech, for example, on the same computer running a Unicode-based version of Windows, from Windows XP to Windows 7. This means that the same computer can run Internet searches quickly on many different websites, as well as on the Google interfaces that are available in different languages.

The national offices of countries that cooperate with the EPO provide interfaces in many languages, allowing easy access to the EPO server and the databases of those offices. The EPO database can sometime (depending on the language) also be used to find the correct translation of technical terms in a number of languages.

Table 1 lists the countries that cooperate with the EPO and the languages supported by their sites. The URLs will take you to the EPO search page with interfaces in the respective languages, and you can click your way to the main page of national patent offices from this search page as well. For example, you can run a search in Czech after clicking a few links. You can then display a patent filed by a major US, German, or French company in a Czech translation in the Czech Republic in order to compare Czech translations of technical terms to English technical terms.

Going through the interface in a national language sometime allows you to search for terms in languages other than English or German. For example, you could type a French technical term in the Czech interface of the EOP website in order to display French patents from the French Patent Office. This may also work for interfaces in other languages. One can hope that at some point in the future, the European Union will make it possible for translators to quickly access the text of patent in languages other than English through the website of each country.

(Note – some of the links in the table below may not work anymore, but most of them should still work).

Table 1 – Countries Cooperating with the European Patent Office

Patent translators who are aware of important Internet resources can also locate patents for clients who may not know how to find the text of foreign patents online. For example, I sometimes get calls from chemists, librarians, paralegals, inventors, and translator agency coordinators who may have only the patent number or an English summary of a Japanese or German patent and do not know how to obtain a copy of the foreign-language text. Once I have the correct number or other information describing the patent in question, I can quickly download the patent from the JPO, EPO, GPO or WIPO website, create a PDF file and send it to the new prospective client with a cost and turnaround time estimate. Thanks to the Internet, relatively inexpensive high-speed connections and wireless networks, multilingual patent translators can even provide a limited patent search service in a foreign language.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Vitek, Steve Vlasta; Reflections of a Human Translator on Machine Translation. Translation Journal, July 2000.

Vitek, Steve Vlasta; Useful Machine Translations of Japanese Patents Have Become a Reality. Translation Journal, April 2002

Patent translators are often very stubborn people. Sometime it works to their advantage, and sometime it works to their detriment.

I knew a translator in San Francisco who in the late eighties refused to use computers. He had been translating Japanese patents since the early seventies on his typewriter and he really liked the mechanical action of working on his typewriter. There is something about the mechanical beauty of writing on a typewriter that disappeared when humans stopped using typewriters after about 100 years and replaced them by computer keyboards by the nineteen eighties. This guy, who had his quota of translated pages that he was able to produce on his typewriter in the morning so that he could take the afternoon off (he was also refusing to work in the afternoon for a long time), eventually had to throw in the towel of course, because his clients wanted to have the translations in the form of computer files, not as typewritten pages. So eventually he did buy a computer, but refused to buy a modem – this was still in late eighties before there was Internet. He was sending diskettes by Federal Express, take it or leave it. Eventually, of course, he joined the rest of the e-mail literate crowd and started sending files from his AOL address. It must have saved him a bundle on Fedex charges. Some things just took him a little longer than most people – about 10 years longer. Incidentally, the only reason why the customers put up with the quirks of this translator was that he was also very good. Was he doing it mostly for his ego? Who knows.

I knew another translator who never learned touch typing. Instead, he developed his own method for typing with 2 fingers only. He was very fast, probably as fast as anybody who is touch typing. Plus the entertainment value of watching him pecking away on his keyboard extremely quickly with 2 fingers was simply indescribable. I could go on and on about translators who stubbornly refused to adopt new-fangled ways and resisted … almost until the bitter end – but usually not quite. For example, this translator refused to learn Microsoft Word for as long as possible. I was using WordPerfect 9 up until about 5 years ago and converting files to Microsoft Word, although it was a waste of time, of course, and the format was sometime messed up by the conversion. But WordPerfect was not really just a word processing program to some of us back in the day, it was more like a religion. I still have WordPerfect installed on my computers although I never use it anymore.

But to this day I refuse to use a translation memory such as Trados or whatever other translation memory tools there may be. There are many other translators, mostly people who have been translating for decades, who share my opinion. I don’t think that this is an irrational decision, unlike some of the decisions of stubborn translators described above. First of all, I would have to spend several hundred dollars first to buy the software and then I would have to learn it. It would probably take me a long time to learn it. I don’t want to do that. But the main reason why I refuse to learn a translation memory tool is that I don’t think that it would be very useful for my purposes. From what I understand about translation memory tools, they are very useful as they save a lot of time when one is translating chunks of repetitive texts with a lot of technical terms in them that are difficult to remember, for instance in instruction manuals which can be very technical and very repetitive, for example when new editions of the same software package are updated every couple of years or so.

But even though patents can be extremely repetitive, the same thing is repeated over and over like a Buddhist mantra in the claims, in the main description of the patent, and for good measure also in the description of the effects of the invention at the end of the patent application, the repetitive character of the text in one patent application is not applicable to other patents, which are written by other authors (patent agents) and may relate to other fields. Especially for somebody like me who works from several languages (Japanese, German, French and sometime also other languages into English), it would be expensive and really messy if I had to keep different versions of translation memory tools in different languages on my hard disk.

Some translation agencies these days require translators to use Trados or similar translation memory tool software. They can then create a database of technical terms in different languages which can be shared with other translators and used on future projects (but of course, the terms are then not owned by the translators who created the database, but by the agency). Oh, well, fortunately for me, I mostly work for patent law firms and none of them ever actually asked me so far about a translation memory tool.

In the interest of full disclosure, there is one translation memory tool that I do use. I use yellow post-it notes, the broad size, which I stick on the bottom of my monitor. On the left I write terms that for some reason are hard to remember in Japanese or German and on the right side goes the word in English. When I am done with the translation, the post-it note goes into garbage.

This translation memory works very well for this patent translator. And I don’t have to share my precious database of technical terms with anybody. I just keep them in my head. And when I die, another patent translator will have to create his or her own databases in his or her own head. The database that’s in my head will be gone forever. But the translations will still be there, on paper and on Internet. The other day I was Googling something and came across a translation of a medical study that was identified as mine. I took a look at it, and it looked fine, except that I could not remember at all that this was something that I translated.

Maybe I do need a translation memory tool, but not Trados. I should probably eat raw carrots or fruits that stimulate brain functions or something. I’ll have to research these memory tools at some point.

UPDATE I:

A translator living in Germany e-mailed me this link to an interesting discussion about a fantastic claim that one can translate 34,501 words with Trados in 10 hours. It should be noted that the translator who made this claim is a “certified Trados trainer” and thus presumably she can make money from people who buy the software and need to learn it. I found out about this discussion too late to participate, but I would be highly skeptical of her claim.  I sometime translate very long Japanese patents with extremely repetitive passages. I remember a long patent that described in 62,000 words something that could have been easily described in 4,000 words. So obviously, I use a lot of cutting and pasting for this kind of work. However, because I have to proofread both the source and the target language and look very carefully for small differences (such as “widget flange a’” instead of “widget flange a””), I can almost never translate more than about 5,000 words a day even with this type of highly repetitive translation. If I try to push over the limit of 5,000 words, I know that I will start making mistakes, which could cost me the customer.

I don’t think that the human brain can process 34,501 words of a translation in 10 hours (in two languages it would be close to 70,000 words, right)? Machines can do it easily, but machines don’t care about mistakes (or anything else for that matter).

I think the fantastic statement above is just another example of insidious commercial propaganda of the kind that we are unfortunately exposed to here in America on a daily basis.

UPDATE II

Here is another argument against translation memory tools. I don’t have to use them because I mostly work for direct clients, usually patent law firms, rather than translation agencies. I am pretty sure that patent law firms would be kind of leery about translators who actually use translation memory tools to speed up the process. But many agencies require freelance translators to use a particular TMS, usually Trados. Once you use it, the agency (or even a direct client) may  create a sliding scale for rates depending on the number of “matches”, or repetitions of words and sentences, which means that you get paid less in the end if there are many repetitions in the text.

A few months ago, I translated two very similar Japanese patents for a very small agency. I have known the guy who runs it, who is a translator himself, for something like 20 years. I sent him an invoice for three thousand dollars. He e-mailed me back, saying that based on “matches” in the text of both patents, he would only pay me two thousand three hundred dollars. Well, some passages, such as prior art, were very similar, almost identical. But the final proofreading of these similar passages takes up so much time, precisely because they are so similar, that I have to charge full rate. In the end he did pay what was in my invoice, but only after I fired off a slew of very angry messages. And our relationship of some 20 years has been seriously compromised.

I think that this particular translator is used to this type of reasoning because that is what agencies and clients that he works for are used to as well, since he is using Trados or something like that. Translation memory software thus may exert a downward pressure on the rates of all translators, even those who are in a position to refuse to use them.

So after all, it might not be such a good idea to use Trados if you want to get paid a decent rate.

In the summer of 1987, a few months after I decided to become a full-time freelance translator, I was hired by an owner of a translation agency in San Francisco to translate medical and legal documents from German for 8 hours a day at an hourly rate, Monday through Friday, in his offices and on his computer. The law firm wanted to maintain the utmost confidentiality possible, which meant that I had to work in this office till death or victory, as they say in Russian. Victory in this case meant finishing a box of documents and getting paid for it by a law firm. Because at that point I had virtually no clients except for this agency, and I had to pay off my computer, printer, and dictionaries, all of which I had to put on my credit card, I accepted, without even trying to haggle about the rate. I did not die and we did get paid. It took me about five months to finish the project, with some help from another translator, and on Saturdays and Sundays I was translating a few computer games and patents from Japanese which agencies were slowly beginning to send to me, enticed by my low rates.

In addition to paying off my credit card debt, I discovered several amazing facts during my first and only long assignment for which I was paid on an hourly basis. First of all, I could not possibly translate for 8 hours a day, no matter how hard I tried. I am basically an honest person, and if I agree to a deal, I try to deliver as best as I can on my end of the deal. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not translate for 8 continuous hours. The best that I could deliver was perhaps 6 hours, after subtracting the numerous breaks and distractions that I had to create for myself to maintain my sanity. At first I felt guilty about this, but then I discovered that the agency owner knew that this would happen, and when I told him that my tired brain refuses to work, he would simply tell me to try to learn some computer software or take a break. He knew that when you force yourself too much, you make too many mistakes and lose your client.

Most of the time, I still can translate only five to six hours a day. There is something about the translating activity that causes your brain to stop working properly after a certain finite quota of mental energy has been exhausted. It is probably true also about other mental activities, but it is definitely true about translation.

I think it was Steve Karpa who wrote in a collection of essays about the psychology of translation, containing also contributions from Donald Philippi and John Bukacek, all Japanese technical translators i met in the eighties in San Francisco, that there is a moment of complete confusion in your brain, after you have read a passage in one language, and just before you attempt to reconstruct it in another language. At that point, there is a blank, a vacuum, a complete chaos in your mind, which you have to bridge over to arrive safely to the shore of a different language. The effort that translators must expend to overcome this chaos may explain the fatigue that they seem to feel after a long stretch of work. The more dissimilar the languages, (for instance Chinese and English), and the more unfamiliar the field, concepts, and vocabulary, the more effort may be required, but this principle seems to apply to translation from all languages.

When translating Japanese to English, it is like first running a wrecking ball through a perfectly well built building, and then rebuilding it in a very different architectural style. You can rebuild it in different styles. For instance, you can start the sentence from several different points, although the end of the Japanese sentence where the verb (or several verbs) are hidden, is often the best point, once you have identified what will probably be the subject and object in English. Because the all-important “wadai” (or “theme”) in Japanese has no equivalent in English, it is easy to misplace the subject and connect it with the wrong object or verb if there are several object and verbs in Japanese, as there always seem to be. The theme, which would be probably best described as an adverbial element in Western grammatical terms, is possibly the most confusing component of Japanese grammar when one is trying to rebuild the structure, brick by brick, in a different architectural style. That is what my teacher told me thirty five years ago at my old alma mater in Prague. Back then I was sure that in a couple of years I would understand it almost as well as he did. Thirty five years later I know that he was right, and that I will never really understand it.

Donald Philippi, a pioneer of translation from Japanese and a mentor who defined technical translation as a field to me and many other translators more than anybody else, by simply holding meetings of similarly minded independent spirits in his San Francisco house every few months, used to say that good translators are like tennis or piano players: they have to be born with a gift. You can become very good if you work hard, but if you do not have the gift to begin with, you will never be a good translator or a good tennis player. The gift is probably more important than anything else. If you are a talented mountain climber, you may be able to climb mountains even if you have only one leg or one hand. But if you don’t have the gift, the chances that you will kill yourself during an easy climb are very good, no matter how fit you are.

I believe that just about everybody has a very special gift. The problem is, most people will never discover what their gift is. Perhaps if we fail to find our special gift while we are still very young, we may never be able to find it. Once we reach a certain age, the only talent that matters is our talent to pay the bills. The Beatles could not even read sheet music. But by discovering the talent that they had while they were still playful kids, willing to experiment with their lives and with their music, they were able to merge in their music an incredible number of new currents and old traditions and transform it into a new sound that changed the history of modern music forever.

You have to be in the mood to create good music or good translation. Donald Philippi also wrote about what he called “a translator’s high”, a magic moment when all things are suddenly clear, and you become a secretary taking divine dictation from above, “pumping anagrams”, as he called it. You just keep on typing and there is no mental fatigue. Or as he liked to say: “Before I realized it, I finished my three thousand words.” These moments are magic indeed, especially if you are being paid a rush rate. In fact, I do not think that it is possible to attain a translator’s high at a low rate.

Although the grammar of a language can be explained and its vocabulary learned, this will still not guarantee that we will be able to master a language by learning the rules, let alone translate it into another language. Good (and bad) translation is very difficult to define. Like pornography, we usually know it when we see it, but that is about the only good definition that I can offer. As to whether it is more science or art, I think that there is too much fiction in it to call it a science. Perhaps it could be called science-fiction. Especially some translation. And there is too much imitation in a good translation to call it art. A good translation is nothing but a very good imitation, even though it can be a very creative imitation. Perhaps it should be called an original imitation. The often repeated cliché about how the translator should be “transparent” is in my opinion based on a misunderstanding of the function of a translator. A pocket translation gadget for $59.95 plus tax which replaces one word by another word, usually incorrectly, is transparent. A good translation reflects the education, religious views, blood type, and DNA of the translator, as well as a hundred other things, if you care to look, even if it is a short patent describing a simple machine. A botched translation can sometime reflect a “terrible clash” between two incompatible authors, the original author, and the translator who is also an author, up to a point. Quite often the writer of the original material is a terrible writer (especially in technical translation), and the translator may be a very good writer. And quite often it is the other way round (especially in technical translation). It can be a strange brew indeed when incompatible DNAs are brewed together in the melting pot of translation.

A part of the translating process that takes place in our mind is probably best defined as magic. That is why machine translation, in spite of all the noise made about it and billions of dollars, yens, and Euros sunk in it, will never really amount to anything but a tool that can be used basically only by translators. Machine translation is in my totally unbiased opinion the tower of Babel revisited. Nihil novum sub sole (nothing new under the sun). Endless lines of computer code instead of endless rows of bricks, both leading to the same result. You can not build a tower to heaven if you don’t know what and where this heaven is. And we can not replace language, which is one of the most essential functions of the human brain, by software, when we have no idea what it is that makes this brain work. In the words of Yogi Bear, a fictional bear character in animated cartoons and one of the preeminent American philosophers of the twentieth century:”It’s not such a good idea if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not even get there!”

How do you program a magic moment into a machine? That is the problem that computer programmers working on machine translation are trying to solve. But this magic moment, when everything in the universe seems to make sense for only a fleeting moment, is so hard to capture. TV script writers, composers, poets, junkies and serial killers, they are all trying to capture this fleeting moment, for money, or just for the fix they get from it, or for both.

Magic moments are very difficult to recreate. I remember one of my magic moments. It was in 1981, and I was riding in a car with a friend on a Bavarian autobahn when this song came up on the tape (“Crazy on You” by the Heart). We were passing Bavarian towns and villages, sprinkled along the highway, always so neat and peaceful, probably at more than 80 miles an hour, which is not a crime in orderly Germany. It must have been the combination of the car’s speed, the music, and perhaps the expectation of our ultimate destination, a new and as yet unknown country that probably speaks a different language and hopefully still has some space left for a couple of weary travelers through the moments of life. It felt like pure magic. Many years later I bought the same tape and drove my car on a California freeway, trying to recreate the magic of the moment. But it did not work. It was just another catchy tune. Maybe I did not go fast enough, afraid to break yet another rule.

Several translators told me that they are addicted to translating. If they go cold turkey for too long (when there is no work), they feel the pain, and it is not just the usual pain which is connected with meager account receivables. I know what they mean. I think they miss the magic moment that comes from understanding the natural order of things, when, for a fleeting moment, we become a secretary of the big clock maker, architect and translator, and take the dictation at record speed without making a single typo.

So remember, if your customers are telling you that your rate is too high, try not to judge them too harshly, for they know not what they are doing. They think that they are paying you by the word. Your customers will never understand that they are paying you for priceless moments of your life that will never come back again.

Helpful sign at an airport in Japan

A few times a year I receive a call from a lawyer who wants to know how much would I charge to “clean up” a “pretty good” machine translation of a Japanese patent. My answer is always the same. Unfortunately, I do not edit machine-translated patents because it usually takes longer to do that than to retranslate the patent from scratch. I provide only human translation.

I wrote several articles about machine translation of patents for Translation Journal and other publications almost a decade ago, including “Reflections of  a Human Translator on Machine Translation” and “Useful Translation of Japanese Patents Have Become a Reality“. These articles were published online and discussed on websites in several languages, such as Arabic, Hungarian, Spanish and Chinese, as well as translated into Polish and other languages.

The Japan Patent Office has been providing a free machine translation service on its website since March 2000. So did this machine translation service influence the life of this human translator of patents from Japanese? I think that it did. For instance, that lawyer is calling me on the phone because he knows about the free translation tool on the JPO website, and possibly also because he came across one of my articles on the Web. Sometime I do end up retranslating the patent. So that would be a positive influence of machine translation on my business. If machine translation could work the way people who don’t know much about translation think it should and could work, after 10 years of free software that can translate in the same manner as humans, but for free, I should be out of business. But I am still here. Some years I am very busy and some years are kind of slow, but this has nothing to do with the availability of free or cheap machine translation and everything to do with the ebb and flow of technical translation which basically follows general economic trends.

I think that the free machine translation tool available on the JPO website often makes it possible for potential clients who do not read Japanese to discover Japanese patents of interest to them that would otherwise be hidden. And some of them will be translated by human translators such as yours truly.

The issue of machine translation is also hotly debated on discussion groups for translators as many translators are afraid that machines could replace them in the same manner as machines replaced humans in so many areas: human bank tellers were replaced by ATMs, some cashiers were replaced by check-out scanners, and many mid-level managers were replaced by sophisticated software. It seems that a piece of software can be more sophisticated than a mid-level manager.

There was an article recently in New York Times about pharmacists who provide medicine labels in Spanish to their customers in areas with a large Spanish speaking population (40% of the population in that area speaks Spanish according to this article). According to this article “about three-quarters did so. Among these pharmacies, nearly 90 percent used computers to translate labels from English into Spanish, 11 percent used staff members, and 3 percent used professional interpreters”. The reporters then looked at 76 medicine labels the pharmacists had generated using 13 of the 14 computer programs pharmacists reported using for translation. They found that half of all the labels contained serious mistakes. Thirty-two of the labels included incomplete translations and six contained major spelling or grammatical errors. Examples of translation errors included translating “once a day” into “eleven times a day”, replacing “by mouth” with “by the little”, and translating “two times” as “two kiss”. Just imagine, in order to save money, a pharmacist who does not speak Spanish uses a machine to translate instructions on how to take a medication, which can be potentially deadly if it is taken incorrectly, into Spanish and then gives these instructions to customers who speak only Spanish. If you were a pharmacist in an area with a lot of people who speak only Spanish, would you not hire a bilingual person or pay a human translator for this service? I wonder how they do this in other countries with large minorities of people who do not speak the language of the country, such as Holland or France.

I am sure that machine translation is sometime also used in order to save money by other businesses, for example by owners of small hotels in Europe called “pensions”, to translate the content of their websites into English and other languages. But from what I have seen (I look at these sites because I go to Europe quite often), unlike the pharmacists in New York, these businesses mostly use non-native human translators for translation into English. The translations are often clumsy, but usually not silly and incomprehensible which is typically the result of machine translation.

People who develop and keep improving machine translation have been trying to put people like me out of business for more than 60 years now. There has been some improvement in the software. Google is working on a new “statistical” model of machine translation software which is now offered for 52 languages. Google Translate is also used by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and by the European Patent Office (EPO). An insightful article on the issue of machine translation in general and of the approach used for the “Google Translate” machine translation tool, written by David Bellos, director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton, is available online here. My niece in Europe is using machine translation software, probably Google, to try to figure out what is on my blog. As the software improves, it is quite possible, even likely, that the best product of the best machine translation software will become almost indistinguishable from the worst product of non-native amateurs who call themselves translators. But that is probably the best that buyers of machine translation products can hope for. The promises made by public relation departments of companies selling the software product as a replacement for costly human translation are mostly corporate propaganda.

The problem is, machines can translate words, but they cannot translate meaning. By definition, a machine or a piece of software will never understand the meaning of anything. And you cannot translate if you don’t understand the meaning. I can imagine a society that uses machines instead of judges, politicians and presidents. You just feed in the information, the machine will check a database of laws and legal precedents and spit out the result, which could be reviewed by a law clerk or a politician’s aid.

But I cannot imagine a machine or a piece of software that understands the meaning of anything.

On those who step in the same river, different and different waters flow … (You can never step into the same river twice, for new waters are always flowing on to you, it is not the same river and you are not the same person).

Heraclitus

Note: This post was also published in Translorial, a publication of the Northern California Translators Association.

I have been translating patents from Japanese, German, French and other languages into English for more than 23 years now. Before I start working, I usually download a legible copy of the original document from the European Patent Office (EPO) or Japan Patent Office (JPO) website. I usually first go to the EPO website because it lists a “family” of documents. This is very useful because many patents published in foreign languages may have been already filed in English in Europe, North America or Australia. A “Japanese patent” filed by IBM is in fact a Japanese translation of a US patent that was originally published in English, and a “French” patent may have been already translated into English at some point and filed, often in a modified version, in US or Europe, etc.

It would seem redundant and wasteful to pay, often thousands of dollars, for another translation into English when a perfectly good translation is already available on the Internet to anybody with basic Internet searching skills. The problem is, since my customer does not know the original language, he or she cannot determine what are the differences between different documents without ordering a new translation. This is fortunate for us translators, as we normally have a lot of bills to pay.

Conventional Technology, Prior Art, or Background Technology?

Therefore, sometime I find myself translating a text in Japanese, German, or French although I have in front of me a corresponding text in English. I would estimate that I can find an English equivalent for about 20% of patents that I translate from Japanese, German or French. Most of the time, the changes are minor – for example the English heading “Background of the Invention” may be translated into Japanese as “Conventional Technology” or as “Prior Art” (“sendan no gijutsu” or “jurai no gijutsu“), although there is a perfectly good Japanese equivalent (“hatsumei no haigo“). The position of these sections is also reversed in different languages, for example they start with a description of figures and end with claims in Europe, but in Japan they start with claims and end with figures – because everything is the other way round in Japan as everybody who lived there for a while and knows the language will confirm. The only major difference between these documents is usually only in the claim section because there are different requirements on claims in different countries. What is perfectly acceptable in America may not acceptable in Japan or in Europe and vice versa.

Because I know that my customer almost certainly has the English equivalent as well, I have to be very careful when I translate the same document again into English. Most of the time, if I make a minor error or omission when translating from a language that relatively few foreigners know, such as Czech or Japanese, nobody will notice it. But not in this case. This means that I actually spend more time working on these types of “new translations” than if I translate from scratch. Once you identify the terminology and understand the concept of the invention, you can usually pick up speed fairly quickly if you look only at 2 documents. But not when you have to work with 3 documents. The problem here is what I would call an interrupted stream of consciousness. Once you determine the technical terms that you want use, a translation from scratch is a mostly uninterrupted stream of consciousness, interrupted usually only to the extent that you have to look up something in a dictionary, or Google a concept to understand it better, or the spelling of a name, obscured by transcription with Japanese katakana or Russian Cyrillic. It is a pleasurable activity when you can retrace the line of thinking expressed in one language and say it in another language, by simply looking at one source – usually a piece of paper, and moving your fingers over the keyboard and checking the monitor screen only occasionally. Translating without a lot of interruptions is almost like inspired writing, or “taking down dictation from God” as a friend of mine in San Francisco described it to me a long time ago. If you don’t know the terms, you have to keep interrupting your train of thought all the time, which can be pure torture, sort of like when you are trying to watch a movie and your wife keeps talking to you, complaining about neighbors’ kids or something. When you are retranslating, you have to follow in fact three lines of thinking that you are working with, including your own, which by definition means a lot of stopping, comparing, and going back and forth.

Even a Laborious Retranslation Has Its Moments

But painfully slow retranslation of patents, laborious as it may be, has its moments. The moment I savor the most is when I find a mistake in an otherwise very good or excellent translation. It simply makes my day if it is a brilliant translation, and I still find a mistake in it – not just an awkward formulation, but a clear mistake based on a misunderstanding of the source language. It happens quite often with translations from Japanese, which is not surprising, given how difficult it is to master this language. I have been trying to do that for the last thirty five years and at this point I am still only a modestly advanced beginner. Some translations of Japanese patents into English, published as English equivalent documents for instance on the EPO website, are not very good, which is what I discovered when I was retranslating somewhat modified versions of the same documents. Well, there are just not enough good Japanese translators out there; this is understandable, and as far as I am concerned, it should stay that way. But even English equivalents of German patents published on Internet have mistakes in them. Although the translations published on the EPO website are written in smooth British English, when I look back at the German original, I can sometime spot a mistake, which as I said before, makes me very happy. I think the English word describing this euphoric feeling I am experiencing on such occasions is Schadenfreude.

And Even an Old Dog Can Learn a Few New Tricks

The other benefit that can be derived from laborious retranslation is that even an old dog like me can learn a few new useful tricks. There are things about German and Japanese that I have been wondering about for decades, and there are words and phrases that I have been looking up over and over again for some reasons, dozens of times, without knowing for sure whether I am finally getting it right. I am hardly alone who has suffered from this …. As a German translator recently told me in her e-mail: “I don’t know how many times I have researched drehbar gelagert“. I know what she means. I researched it about half a dozen times myself and then finally settled on “pivotably supported”. But “pivotably supported” is only one possible translation out of many possible translations. There are other possible interpretations, equally good or bad, depending on your viewpoint. It is not unlike different interpretations of a song. The song title “All Along the Watchtower” will evoke in most people of my generation the voice of Jimi Hendrix, rather than the voice of Bob Dylan who is the actual composer and who sang these words first. If you go to Youtube and search for videos of the song “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, according to some the most beautiful song ever written, you will find at least a dozen breathtakingly beautiful interpretations of the same song (Rufus Wainwright’s is the best one in my opinion). Drehbar gelagert can be also translated as rotationally mounted, rotationally arranged, rotatably arranged, and at least a dozen other variations are possible. None of them is really better than the other and some are pretty ugly, although they can still be found online, such as “turnably stored, rotatably supported”. The problem here is that, as Heraclitus would put it, we are trying to enter the same river too many times. I think that Leonard Cohen would understand, although some of our customers might not.

Sitting in Judgment of Jabberwockies

We all like to “sit in judgment” of others. That is why all those (fake reality) talent TV shows are so popular. They have them here in US, in many European countries and elsewhere probably too. They probably have a very popular TV show called “Mongolia Has Talent”, or “Mongolian Idol” in Ulaanbaatar too. It feels so good to be able to tell the real thing from a fake. Most of the existing translations that I am recreating for a paying client are not very complicated, but sometime it does take talent to translate impenetrable German sentences or huge chunks of descriptive Japanese paragraphs that have no subject, no singular or plural, with a verb which has no tense and which is hiding at the very end.

Some of the formulations in the patents I have to translate simply make no sense, even if I read them several times. Lets call them “Jabberwockies” after the nonsensical poem by Lewis Carroll:

“‘Twas brillig, and slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.”

Now compare the original Jabberwocky above to my translation of an actual German patent:

In order to deal with the stress created by the onslaught of large amounts of omnipresent information, on the one hand, the substantiality or the mass of a great number of construction mechanisms are rendered invisible under covering enclosures; while contributing on the other hand also to free time activities, the postindustrial society rediscovered in addition to sport-oriented versions of actual cycling also the esthetics of the design and the structural requirements leading to comfort during bicycling.

Which of the two Jabberwockies makes more sense to you? I suppose it is in the eye of the beholder, but I can easily visualize “slithy toves gyring and gimbling in the wabe”. But “substantiality or the mass of a great number of construction mechanisms rendered invisible under covering enclosure” …. I really have no idea what that means although it is my own translation. That’s one Jabberwocky that goes too far if you ask me.

But not everything in this world is meant to make sense, I suppose. Or maybe everything does make sense, but we are unable to see invisible connections between anything and everything because “new waters are always flowing on to us and we are not the same people any more anyway”.

After all, we are just translators of sometime lucid and sometime obscure texts that somebody else (a patent agent) will interpret for his client (a tiny upstart company or a huge corporation), so that each link in the food chain can make money – a little bit for the translator, a little bit more for the agent, and a lot for the corporation.

The Borderless World

I borrowed the title for my post from Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese writer who was writing about new business strategies for the brave new world after the demise of Soviet Unit way back in the nineties when most people did not understand what he was talking about. I was one of those people. I tried to read his book 20 years ago but I just could not connect.

But I do know something about the borders in this world. I remember how I was staring at the Berlin Wall from the eastern side in 1969. I bought a big map of East Berlin to make sure that I don’t get lost in that unfamiliar town. It was the strangest map I ever saw. There was a huge blank portion in the center of the map with nothing in it, completely white. That part just around the corner simply did not exist. Hic sunt leones. I also remember the strange feeling when I was crossing the West German border on a train to Prague as I was coming back from France in 1970. I saw the no man’s land, the barbed wire and the watchtowers. I was coming back to a well guarded prison called home.

The hideous, impenetrable borders have disappeared after half a century from the face of Central Europe. You can take a train from České Budějovice (Böhmisch Budweis) to Vienna without any problems as you could a hundred years ago when both České Budějovice and Vienna were in one country called Austria-Hungary.

Small parts of those borders have been preserved as show pieces for tourists. About five years ago I walked across the Czech-German border on foot, just to see what it looks like now. Nobody was guarding it. There was a sign there that said that if you are not a citizen of European Union, you should have your passport on you. I did have my passport on me but I did not need it – the barracks for the border guards were still there, but they were empty. When I crossed the border, a blonde German girl on the other side was walking with 2 horses and 2 dogs. “Grüß Gott”, I said. “Grüß Gott”, she replied and then started apologizing when the dogs started barking at me. Maybe the dogs thought they were still supposed to guard the border. Dogs know about borders. Unlike for instance children and migrant workers, dogs understand the concept of borders very well.

The world is not really borderless and probably never will be. But the borders are now mostly in our mind. We are divided by languages, cultures and attitudes created by those cultures. Every time when I translate a patent from Japanese, German or another language, I am helping to erase a tiny part of the remaining border – the linguistic one. My customer can now write a claim for a new patent application while knowing exactly how a similar invention is described in another patent application in Japan or another country.

In this borderless world, everything flows toward a slightly different design, smaller, lighter, cheaper, more convenient. You can pretty much tell the year in which a film was made by looking at the cell phones the actors are using in that film. There is a big difference between the design of cell phones from 2007 and 2010. And the phones in 2013 will look nothing like the phones we are using now.

This particular poem by Josef Kainar is probably about the hopelessness of life in communist Czechoslovakia in the fifties. But I don’t really know what it is about, I am just guessing.

And there is a little bit of hope hidden somewhere in the text …

But I am not sure where. Maybe he is saying that life is beautiful even if there is no hope that things will get better one day.

The words about the French expedition are in Kainar’s poem but not in the song.

Kainar Josef

(26.09.1917 – 16.11.1971)

Stříhali do hola malého chlapečka

Stříhali dohola malého chlapečka All of the little boy’s hair had to go now
kadeře padaly k zemi a zmíraly the curls were falling on the floor and slowly dying there
kadeře padaly jak růže do hrobu the curls were falling down, like roses into a grave
Železná židle se otáčela an iron chair was being turned around

Šedaví pánové v zrcadlech kolem stěn All the gray gentlemen in the mirrors on the walls            
Jenom se dívali Jenom se dívali they were just watching, they just kept watching
Že už je chlapeček chycen a obelstěn they saw the little boy captured and hoodwinked
V té bílé zástěře kolem krku with a white apron, tied around his neck

Jeden z nich Kulhavý učitel na cello One of them, the Limping cello teacher
Zasmál se nahlas A všichni se pohnuli he laughed out loud, and they were all so startled
Zasmál se nahlas A ono to zaznělo he laughed out loud, and the sound was just like
Jako kus masa když pleskne o zem when a piece of bloody meat smacks the floor

Francouzská výprava v osmnáctsettřicetpět A French expedition in eighteen hundred and thirty five
Vešla do katakomb křesťanské sektičky entered the catacombs of a tiny Christian sect
Smích ze tmy do tmy a pod mrtvý jazyk zpět there’s laughter from darkness to darkness and back under your dead tongue
Je vždy kus masa jež pleskne o zem every time when a piece of bloody meat smacks the floor

Učeň se dívá na malého chlapečka A young apprentice is watching the little boy
jak malé zse dívává na jiné a little animal watching another one
Ještě ne chytit a rváti si z cizího not quite yet catch and tear into pieces what is not mine
A už přece but maybe already

Ráno si staví svou růžovou bandasku Each morning he puts his little pink milk can
Na malá kamínka Na vincka chcípáčka on a tiny stove they call Vincent the conk out artist
A proto učňovy všelijaké myšlenky all kinds of strange thoughts then float in his head
jsou vždycky stranou A trochu vlažné all of them kind of off the wall and a bit lukewarm

Toužení svědící jak uhry pod mýdlem The longing itching like zits itching under soap
Toužení svědící po malé šatnářce the longing after a little coat check girl
Sedává v kavárně pod svými kabáty she sits in the cafe under her coats
Jako pod mladými oběšenci as if under young hanged bodies

Stříhali dohola malého chlapečka All of the little boy’s hair had to go now
Dívat se na sebe Nesmět se pohnouti watch yourself and don’t you make a move
nesmět se pohnouti na židli z železa no moving is allowed on his iron chair

Už mu to začalo It’s already starting for him too.

I found a message from Jeremy Angel, a Japanese-to-English translator in Nagano, Japan, on Honyaku, which is a mailing list/discussion forum for Japanese translators:

“Hi folks,

I’ve searched high and low and sideways too for an English translation or even original French for this quote from 19th century French historian Jules Michelet, but to no avail:

生命は自らとは異なった生命と交流すればするほど，他の存在との連帯を増し，力と，幸福と，豊かさを加えて生きるようになる”

Somebody eventually found the original quote in French, and an English translation was eventually also found. See below:

“La vie s’allume et s’aimante à la vie, s’éteint par l’isolement. Plus elle se mêle aux vies différentes d’elle-même, plus elle devient solidaire des autres existences, et plus elle existe avec force, bonheur, fécondité.”

“Life is lighted and kindled by life, is extinguished by isolation. The more it mingles with lives different from its own, the more it is answerable for other existences, the stronger, happier, and more fecund is its own existence.”

The English translation is much better than the Japanese one, although I really don’t like the word “answerable” here. CEOs are answerable to shareholders. I don’t see solidarity in that.

But the Japanese translation, for example, simply ignores ” s’éteint par l’isolement”.  What kind of translator can possibly miss this part?

“La vie s’éteint par l’isolement”. That is why everybody and their grandmother has a blog these days. That is why solitary imprisonment is the worst kind of torture. That is why teenagers commit suicides when their love is unrequited. They cannot face the isolation.

Because nobody can.

by Steve Vitek

If you’re going to San Francisco, you’re gonna need some dictionaries and a few good friends.

This article was published first by Translation Journal
http://accurapid.com/journal/48japanese.htm
, and it is also republished on my website at
http://patenttranslators.com/
.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, I returned from Tokyo to San Francisco, looking for a job. I had been living in San Francisco from 1982 to 1985, then moved in 1985 with my new wife to Tokyo (the US immigration laws required her to wait for an immigrant visa in her home country). Although I could have stayed in Japan longer as I had a job there as an in-house translator for a small Japanese import company, I realized that Japan would never really feel like home to me the way California did to this immigrant from Central Europe. It was not very hard to find a job in San Francisco right away, as long as I did not mind a low pay. I worked for a few months for another Japanese import company, this time in South San Francisco, then a few months for a Japanese travel agency, but I was bored and really unhappy with my work. I needed something that would be more challenging and that would at the same time pay more money.

It was at this point that I met Donald Philippi. As fate would have it, he also lived in the Richmond district of San Francisco, not far from Golden Gate Park, only a few blocks away. Don (who preferred to be called Slava because he somehow remembered that in his previous incarnation he was a Russian named Slava Ranko, which is why he learned Russian, or so he said), was one of the first pioneers of technical translation from Japanese to English. When he lived in Japan in the sixties and seventies studying Japanese and Ainu languages (Ainu is the name of the original inhabitants of Japan who are now virtually extinct), he figured out early on that it is much easier to make a living translating technical manuals and specifications from Japanese to English for companies such as Hitachi and Fujitsu, than, say, compiling an Ainu-English dictionary. Technical Japanese was at that time translated into English almost exclusively by native Japanese speakers who had a technical background but no linguistic background and whose fluency in English was often not very good. After his return from Japan to US in the early seventies, Don (or Slava) set up his shop in a house he bought with money obtained from his translating work in Japan and wisely invested in the purchase of a small house in Tokyo. Upon his return to California, Don bought a house on 10^th Avenue in San Francisco where he turned 4 bedrooms on second floor into a single room which served as a translator’s office and started cranking out technical translation from Japanese again, what else, on an IBM typewriter. More information about Don’s life, including his obituary and 3 interviews conducted with him in this period by Fred Schodt, is available on Fred Shodt’s website here:
http://www.jai2.com/dlp.htm
. In 1983 Don started publishing his newsletter called Technical Japanese Translation, which was mailed to people who were interested in the subject and somehow ended up on his mailing list. In its second year of publishing (1984), Don described the newsletter as follows: “This is the only newsletter published anywhere in the world by and for our far-flung and obscure community of Japanese technical translators. It is a completely grassroots endeavor with no subsidies or support except that given by its readers. It is now going into its second year and has more than 150 readers on three continents”. In fact, it was not unlike an early version of publications such as the Translation Journal, with emphasis on Japanese technical translation, before the age of Internet.

I did not know Don at that time, and I did not find out about the newsletter until a few years later when the newsletter was no longer in existence. But thanks to the magic of the Internet, an archived form of the newsletter lives on, this time on the following URL of the website of Waseda University:
http://www.f.waseda.jp/buda/tjt/tjt-idx.html
. It is interesting to read about the different topics discussed in the issues of Technical Japanese Translation over a period of about 2 years some 25 years ago. The topics discussed by technical translators back then and now have not really changed that much: technology (which now means mostly computers and Internet, but back in the prehistoric eighties meant mostly extremely expensive, stand-alone Japanese word processors—basically typewriters with a tiny LCD display plus a printer, new books published about Japan in English and about America in Japanese, the viability of machine translation and the perceived threat that MT could become one day to human translators if it ever could work (the conclusion in Technical Japanese Translation back then was that it would never really work; today most people think it will). Also, various databases available to translators, such as databases of chemicals, plants and species and other scientific and technical databases in existence some 15 years before there was Google, or rates for various types of technical translation paid back then by agencies and direct customers in US, England, Japan, and Australia (they did not really go up that much, taking into account inflation, they probably went down in some cases), as well as new words in Japanese, the apparent “threat” to US technology represented by Japanese technology and many other subjects.

The End of a Newsletter

Towards the end of 1984, Don published and mailed out the last issue of Technical Japanese Translation. It must have been a lot of work putting the newsletter together—a lot of fun too, I am sure, but I can’t even begin to imagine how hard one person would have to work to keep publishing this material back in the prehistoric times before the Internet. Partly as a result of the newsletter, translators who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area become aware of each other and soon after the demise of the Technical Japanese Translation, Don started holding meetings in his house on issues of interest to translators, mostly dealing with technical translation from Japanese, but not always. Because Don was a well known personality not only in the Bay Area but also in Japan and other countries, he was able to attract interesting people who would serve as the “main speaker” on a whole range of subjects. Some of them came from East Coast, Pacific Northwest, Southern California, Australia, Japan, England … these are only the few that I can remember. In some respects, the meetings were similar to regular meetings of NCTA (Northern California Translators Association) which were at that time also held in San Francisco. Agency representatives would come to give out business cards and collect information and publishers of dictionaries would come to promote their new products. One of the owners of Inter Press Japan Corporation came from Japan. He was so happy to see so many prospective buyers of his dictionaries gathered in one place – Don’s den for translators, filled with books, dictionaries, records, tapes and CDs. Don promptly bought all his dictionaries, including his “Sanjugomango Daijiten”. This is a large technical Japanese-English dictionary with 350,000 technical terms, a major improvement in 1990 over an earlier version from 1986 which had only 250,000 technical terms. I bought the large dictionary myself as soon as I saved up 800 dollars. I still remember the cost because it was so expensive. But before the advent of Internet, we could not have survived without these dictionaries. The meetings were a continuation of the newsletter, except that instead of reading, translators did a lot of listening and talking to each other. We found out who was working in what field and on what project, which dictionaries were the best ones, and then inevitably then spent a lot of money on dictionaries in the Kinokuniya Bookstore in San Francisco’s Japan Town. People would bring some wine and food and after the speech and discussion, the socializing part would go on for hours in Don’s study and downstairs in the kitchen. And a community of freelance translators was born in San Francisco Bay Area—all of a sudden we saw how many people are out there in the area, some around the corner, some not too far from us, who did not get a steady paycheck like everybody else and yet somehow managed to pay their bills. Back in mid eighties and early nineties, the term “freelance translator” was not as common as today. Work was seen basically as something that you commute to, not as something that you do. It was difficult to convince people who drove to work or took the morning bus to get to their offices in downtown that we were as serious about our work as everybody else, or probably more so. Back in those days it was very difficult for a freelance worker to qualify for a mortgage, for example. And when I told people that that I work at home on my computer translating patents from Japanese, German and French to English, more often than not the result would be an incredulous stare. It was reassuring to be able to socialize with people who were able to make a living without any guarantees of employment from their employer.

The End of an Era

The community of translators who used to congregate in Don’s house several times a year is no longer there. After Don passed away in 1993, we sprinkled his ashes in Marin County near Point Reyes in the green hills overlooking Pacific Ocean and facing Japan. We tried to continue the tradition and met several times afterwards, but it was clear to us that Don’s untimely death was the end of an era and that there was not much we could do about it. Some people moved to other states, some to Japan. I moved in the summer of 2001 to Virginia where the living was …. well, not really easy as the song goes, but definitely easier on your wallet than in high-priced California. I wonder how Don would have reacted to the political developments in the years since his death. Let’s see, he was an anarchist when he was young, a Republican-leaning conservative (Ayn Rand was one of his idols) in his middle age … my guess is that he would possibly be a liberal in his seventies and eighties. A better guess might be that he would be disgusted by it all and work instead on his research of Norito (ancient Japanese ritual prayers) and shamanism, another interest of his that he loved to discuss while guttural songs of Mongolian nomads were played on his record player. I do know that he would really enjoy the advantages of instant access to news and information through Internet. He used to subscribe to Nippon Keizai Shinbun and other Japanese publications, as well as to Pravda because he did not want to forget his Russian. He had a lot of fun reading articles from Pravda to me in his kitchen. He would probably be spending many hours online these days, reading Japanese and Russian newspapers and watching online TV in Japanese and Russian.

I myself only found out about the archived version of the Technical Japanese Translation newsletter by accident when I was googling some obscure technical term. I bookmarked the URL and when I have nothing to do (which may occur to translators more in these uncertain times than we would like to), I sometime read or reread an old issue of the newsletter. It tends to put things into perspective. Compared to the situation more than 25 years ago, some things have changed for better, some for worse, and some remain the same. I hope that some of the readers of the this blog will enjoy reading the issues of an old newsletter published in San Francisco a distant quarter of a century ago.

“The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius”

Abraham Lincoln
(This quotation can be seen at the entrance to the U.S. Patent Office).

The patent system, like all good things, was invented in what is today Italy. A system for granting patents for inventions was first introduced in the 15^th century – the first known grant of a patent to an inventor occurred in the Republic of Florence in 1421 and an ordinance about patents was enacted in Venice in 1474, 18 years before Columbus discovered America. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the word patent is derived from “letters patent”, which earlier designated the document by which a sovereign conferred a privilege or right on someone. The name was a reference to the fact that the document, addressed to public at large, was sealed with the great seal in such a way that the document could be unfolded and read without breaking the seal (“patent,” from the Latin meaning “opened” or “exposed”). While many European languages use the same word patent and this word has in those languages the same meaning as in English, the etymology of the Japanese word for patent “tokkyo” refers to two words – 特（toku, special), and 許(kyo, permission). The permission that a patent refers to is the exclusive right to make (manufacture) and to deal with the subject matter of the patent for a limited period of time. This period depends on the country. In the England of Queen Elisabeth I, exclusive rights for new inventions were granted for 14 years. Comprehensive patent statutes appeared near the end of the 18^th century and specific patent statutes were enacted in most European states in early or mid 19^th century. Revolutionary France adopted in 1791 a statute declaring the natural right of an inventor to the exclusive right to his invention. A special characteristic of the French system was the principle that no examination of any kind was required. The United States originally adopted the French system for patents in 1793, but a new patent which was adopted in this country in 1836 includes what is referred to as examination. A similar system based on examination of patents was adopted by Germany in 1877 and many other countries. An examiner searches through relevant prior patents (existing technology is referred to as “prior art” in English and　”jurai gijutsu” in Japanese), possibly including those of other countries and other available publications, to determine whether or not the invention being claimed is in fact new.

The history of the patent system in Japan should probably start with a so called “Law for New Things” (Shinki Hoteiho), proclaimed in year 6 of the Kyoho Era (1721). Prior to opening of Japan to Western influences (at the start of the Meiji Reform in 1868) there was a tendency to abhor new things. The purpose of this law was described as “to ensure that absolutely no new types of products would be manufactured” (shinseihin wo tsukuru koto wa issai makarinaranu). But even in Japan, it became apparent that a patent system must be created in order to speed up modernization efforts which began after the start of the Meiji Reform in 1868, and Japan publicly proclaimed its own patent law called “Provisional Regulations for Monopoly” in year 4 of the Meiji Era (1871). However, the enforcement of this law was suspended the next year because “the people of the country did not understand it well enough” and also because the government office had problems with the operation of this law. It is interesting to note that after such a slow and ridiculous start of the official machinery of the Japanese state aimed at putting a stop to suspicious new inventions, Japan perfected in a relatively short period of time its system for inventions and patents to become a superpower in one area where being a superpower really counts – conquering new technologies instead of new countries, and converting the skills of its scientists, engineers and technicians, into gold. These Japanese engineers are helped also by a small army of Japanese patent lawyers (called benrishi), whose main skill is their uncanny ability to write completely incomprehensible Japanese patents. Fuzzy copies of these patents, sometime quite old, with characters that are either faint blurs or fat blobs, serve as a good protection against competition, because it is hard, even for a team of American lawyers, to prevail in a lawsuit over a Japanese company when it is not clear what is actually in a Japanese patent.

To qualify for a patent, an invention must be new and satisfy the criterion of novelty, which means that it must be a new concept. If the invention has been described previously in a printed publication (for instance in the proceedings from a lecture series of an academic society, distributed to a handful of people), it is no longer considered new and a patent can not be granted. It also has to satisfy the requirement of “inventive step” or “unobviousness” (referred to as “shimposei” in Japanese), which means that the new subject matter must sufficiently advance the existing technology or techniques. If the invention merely enables a solution that would be obvious to persons having special knowledge in the relevant field (“persons in the art”, referred to as “togyosha” in Japanese), a patent should not be granted. Needless to say, this criterion is often very subjective and depends on the interpretation of an examiner. The history of patents is so fascinating because it is really the history of the capacity of the human mind to conceive of new methods to solve old problems. Some of the major historical patents and patent-related inventions and events are listed below:

1752  lightening arrester (Franklin)

1814  locomotive engine (Stephenson)

1857  dynamite (Nobel)

1887  phonograph (Edison)

1893  diesel engine (Diesel)

1895  wireless communication method (Marconi)

1925  Yagi’s antenna for ultra-short waves (Yagi)

1947  the transistor is invented at Bell laboratories

1969  Sony Corporation introduces the video recorder

1981  IBM introduces the first PC (and hires Microsoft to design its operating system)

1996  Microsoft’s Bill Gates becomes the richest person in the world

In addition to patents, industrial property laws also protect utility models, designs, and trademarks.

The Japanese Patent Office ingeniously explains on its Web page (translated into English, along with other documents of the Japanese Patent Office by yours truly), (
http://www.jpo.go.jp/seido_e/s_gaiyou_e/222e.htm
) the difference between a patent, a utility model, a design, and a trademark as follows:

(Patent)

An invention of the telephone set design, that is to say the first application of the electromagnetic method used for communication.

(New Utility Model)

A utility model can relate to the shape, construction, etc., or utilization of an integrated unit equipped with a separate telephone receiver and telephone transmitter. (Utility models are used only in some countries, such as Japan and Germany).

(Design)

A smart design of a desktop telephone relating to its shape, pattern, and other design characteristics.

(Trademark)

A mark provided on the product, packaging, etc., in order to indicate the reliability of maintenance and other characteristics of the products produced by the company that manufactured the telephone set.

If the last four or five hundred years covering development of the patent system in various countries were filled with spectacular inventions, which were adding fuel to the seemingly inexhaustible engine driving these invention called the human brain, the last four or five decades, starting with the invention and development of the transistor in the fifties and continuing with the design of the microprocessor in the seventies, were unprecedented in how this new technology changed and continues to change our world. Computers, faxes, printers and modems and wireless networks replaced and sometime obliterated entire established professions. At the same time, these new technologies created new professions, such as software developers and technical translators, which did not even exist twenty years ago. Armed with a handful of fairly affordable gadgets and connected to an online service, a freelance translator is now free to look for customers and find context, documents and reference sources in dozens of languages anywhere in this world. It is easy to see that in this “borderless, interconnected, interdependent”, etc., world, the need for professional translators of technical and legal documents, who can be hired on a moment’s notice for a single job that can be completed in a few minutes or for a series of projects stretching over a period of many years, will only grow.

It is also likely that the field of technical inventions with international designs and trademarks will create a lot of interesting work for freelance translators. A look at some of the more famous or infamous design and trademark issues that resulted in protracted litigation battles, sometime with an international twist to them, may shed some light on the kinds of issues that could be hotly disputed in the near future.

Remember how Steve Jobs once visited a Xerox laboratory in what would in a few years become Silicon Valley, but back in the prehistoric seventies was still a landscape of peaceful orchards and not much more? What he saw in that lab, and nobody else there could see it even though they all had eyes, was a revolutionary design of a computer pointing device called mouse, which could be used to issue commands to a computer instead of typing commands that nobody could remember except for computer programmers. Suddenly it clicked in Steve Job’s brain and he could hardly conceal his excitement. Those Xerox engineers had no idea that what they invented was the beginning of new operating software that would in a decade or two help to put personal computers on the desks of hundreds of millions of people who speak all kinds of languages. Steve Jobs then “appropriated” the Xerox idea for the purposes of his new concept and set out to change the world with his “insanely great” Macintosh computers. And change the world he did. He gave Microsoft’s Bill Gates a good run for his money, but Bill Gates in the end finally dumped his prehistoric operating system (DOS) and finished first because he always finishes first. Apple then sued Microsoft for using a “Mac-like” interface design, which Apple did not invent in the first place since the original idea was conceived in Xerox laboratories. The design protection lawsuit that Apple lost (who remembers how many years ago?) was a precursor of many similar lawsuits involving designs, names, shapes, and music, among other things, quite a few of them international.

For example, there was the lawsuit against George Harrison, which accused him of having “stolen” the tune of “My Sweet Lord” from the author of the song “He’s So Fine” for the Shiffons back in the sixties. The famous Beatle actually lost this lawsuit and had to pay the composer whose name nobody remembers any more two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I don’t think that he consciously stole the melody, but the melody is quite similar.

Or for a more recent development, there was a lawsuit in which Kendall-Jackson, a winery in the town of Santa Rosa here in Northern California’s wine country, accused Gallo of having stolen their design of a vine leaf for a Gallo brand of wines called Turning Leaf. Kendall-Jackson lost because the judge decided that nobody can claim to own the image of a leaf, not even in California.

On the other hand, there is no law against owning the moon and selling pieces of it to other people. There is a guy somewhere in United States, I forgot in which state, who claimed sovereignty over the moon (apparently, this would be illegal for a corporation, but not for a private person) and he now has a company which is selling real estate on the moon. It’s perfectly legal, and people are buying in droves. Then, when they have a barbecue party in their backyard, they can proudly point to a spot on the moon and say: “See that spot on the moon over there? It’s mine, I bought it. And it was only forty nine thousand dollars.” Now, that’s a truly American design. I doubt that a Japanese or German businessman would ever think of something like that. If the American entrepreneur was ever sued at some point, which would seem likely, I have not heard about it, possibly because no translations were needed.

My all time favorite international intellectual property litigation, however, must be the ongoing dispute between Anheuser-Busch and European beer brewers, including a tiny brewery in the Czech town of Budejovice (called Budweis in German).

According to Bloomberg News, Bitburger Brauerei, a German beer brewer based in the town of Bitburg, wants the European Union’s trademark office to annul Anheuser-Busch and American Bud trademarks because Anheuser-Busch is “difficult to pronounce, especially after drinking beer”, and consumers tend to shorten it to “Bud”, which in noisy bars can lead to confusion over Bitburger’s trademark “Bit” according to documents filed at the European Court in Luxembourg. To which I would say: “Lass dir Raten, trinke Spaten” (take my advice and drink Spaten). Problem solved.

The legal dispute between Anheuser-Busch and a tiny beer brewery in southern Bohemia in Czech Republic is also very interesting. The advertising budget of Anheuser-Busch alone is bigger than the total revenues of the tiny Czech Budweiser Company. Back in 1911, the brewers of the Czech Budweiser brand, the original Budweiser beer, according to Czechs dating back to 13^th century, agreed to let the Americans use the name Budweiser beer in America but kept the rights to this name in Europe. The Czechs consider the seven centuries of Budweiser brewing tradition an important part of their national heritage and don’t want the American Budweiser beer to put their good name to shame in Europe. That’s the way they see it. Somebody must save European civilization from American mass production, and the lofty tasks fell upon the strong shoulders of burly Czech beer brewers. The trademark dispute battle rages on. The Czechs will not sell out to the Americans. No way.

I wonder what Abraham Lincoln would say if he knew about this mighty intellectual property issue battle. My guess is that he would ask to take a sip from both bottles, and then, he just might have to side with the Czech beer brewers.

He was an honest man. And for a president, he had good taste.

UPDATE – Czech Budweiser Wins Suit Over Naming Rights in Europe

This is still some justice in this world, see this link to a Walt Street Journal article. However, my bet would be that Anheuser-Bush, which was in the meantime bought by a Belgian Company, will probably appeal if it has not appealed already. There should be still a few thousand billable hours left in the case.

Maria Cornelio, director of the Hispanic Research and Recruitment Center at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, comes to the same conclusion in an article Published by the American Translators Association (ATA) Chronicle as I did.

http://www.hablamosjuntos.org/resources/pdf/Beware_of_Bilingual.PDF