The Changing World of Japanese Patent Translators
Anything that creates unity and harmony and dispels distrust and hatred is a step
forward. The translator, obviously, has a very important role to play. I think I
am carrying out a task which, in their way, my parents wanted me to perform, and
I know that all those teachers and friends from the older generations who guided
me and helped me along wanted me to do this, too. The microcosm and the macrocosm
converge somewhere—by imposing a tiny bit of order in a communication you
are translating, you somehow are carving out a little bit of order in the universe.
You will never succeed. Everything will fail and finally come to an end. But you
have a chance to carve out a little bit of order and maybe even beauty out of the
raw materials that surround you everywhere, and I think there is no other meaning
in life.
Donald L. Philippi
Some 15 years ago when I lived in San Francisco, a translation agency in downtown
called and asked whether I could come to their office to have a look at a patent.
It had been faxed to them by a law firm but they were not sure whether it was legible
enough for translating because, like most translation agencies, they could not read
Japanese. So I took the bus downtown and then an elevator to the agency's office
on Market Street to have a look at what appeared to be a third generation fax. It
was hopeless. Nobody can possibly read these illegible blobs, I said to the disappointed
agency owner and went back to Market Street to wait for my bus for the ride back
home, surrounded by the colorful, multilingual, and smelly San Francisco human Zoo
that populates the downtown bus lines. (I used to put on my earphones to blend into
the environment and turn the radio off to listen in on conversations in foreign
languages if I knew the language, or listen to music if nobody talked about anything
interesting or if they talked in a tongue that was foreign to me).
Today all I need is the correct patent number. In most cases, I can go either to
the Japan Patent Office website or the European Patent Office website and download
a legible copy of the patent in question .
Although the resolution of fax transmission has not changed in decades and a second-
or third-generation fax at 90 dots per inch still renders small characters in a
patent almost completely illegible, when customers call me today with a prospective
patent translation, all I need from them is the correct patent number. In most cases,
I can go either to the Japan Patent Office web site or the European Patent Office
website and download a legible copy of the patent in question in Adobe Acrobat format
(.pdf), store it on my hard disk and print it on my printer. I used to order patents
for about $10 from services such as the British Library in London (http://www.bl.uk),
or from the IBM database (http://www.delphion.com), or for about $6 (9 Canadian
dollars) from PatentWorks in Quebec Canada (http://www.patentworks.com), but it
is faster and cheaper (free—courtesy of the Japanese and European taxpayers!!!)
to download the patents directly from the source, although most patent law firms
and some translation agencies sending work to me nowadays will do the downloading
part for me and e-mail an image file to me. These and other services also have links
to free databases (digital libraries) of patents from different countries on their
website. The British Library in London in particular has a comprehensive list of
links to very useful sources of patent databases and other information.
The English Part of the JPO Website Has a Nifty Machine Translation Tool
The Internet has definitely changed the working environment of most translators
of patents from Japanese, German and other languages in the past few years. The
fact that we can go directly to a source of legible patents on line and download
a legible copy almost immediately means that we no longer have to wait 2 or 3 days
for a Fedex delivery of a patent that may or may not be legible, perhaps at a time
when we have no other translation work during those 3 days. Sometime, of course,
the work never arrived if the customer was unable to find a legible copy of the
patent in time. The Japanese Patent Office (JPO) at http://www.jpo.go.jp (this is
a new URL as of March 31, 2001) displays stored Japanese Kokai (unexamined) and
Kokoku (examined) patents, as well as examined and unexamined utility models. The
website has two different parts—an English part and a Japanese part. The two
parts are really two different sites aimed at different audiences. The range of
the English part of this website is very limited because it only contains abstracts
of patents and utility models from the year Heisei 5 in the Japanese calendar (1993).
On the other hand, it has a nifty machine translation program that will translate
in a few seconds a summary of the claims and of the outline of the patent (in about
10 seconds on my DSL line) if you click on the button DETAILS in the English part
of this website. The machine-translated text is not bad, in some cases it is clearly
understandable, especially if the patent describes a simple concept, for instance
a new chemical composition, which is basically defined by the weight percentages
of individual components in this new composition. In fact, the best results of machine-translated
texts available from this free tool are almost indistinguishable from the worst
examples of translations done by humans whose native language is not English, if
we are dealing with a very simple design and a very simple sentence structure. Machine
translation may in fact soon replace robot-like human translators in tasks involving
simple and repetitive texts, although it will probably never replace human translators
for the reasons that I am explaining in another article (see my article Reflections
of Human Translator on Machine Translation in the July 2000 issue of the Translation
Journal).
The Japanese Part of the JPO Website Has the Most Complete Collection of Japanese
Patents and Utility Models
The Japanese part of this website is not very useful for patent lawyers in this
country unless they can read Japanese because everything is in Japanese, including
the instructions on displaying and downloading. If you make a mistake, for instance
by typing in the wrong number of digits or the wrong sequence, the website will
display fourteen (count them ??????????????) angry question marks, which is the
only help that is offered to novice users by the JPO. If you still can't figure
out the proper sequence, an angry spirit dwelling in the innards of the JPO site
will display 28 question marks in two rows (The Help File is of no help, of course,
like all Help Files. I always visualize an angry Japanese face that is looking reproachingly
at me when I see those question marks). Another problem with this site is that the
default display form is low resolution, and the default printing is also in low
resolution, possibly to save storage space for zillions of Japanese patents that
need to be stored and thrown at non-Japanese patent lawyers in legal disputes dealing
with infringement of existing patents. It is possible to change the format by clicking
on the "display again" button and display and print the text at high resolution.
However, this will display and print only selected blocks of text and it is almost
impossible for some reason to print the entire text at high resolution on any of
my printers. I usually print out the whole text at low resolution and then go back
to view or print out at high resolution the portions that are not clearly legible
in my text. In spite of the shortcomings of this website, as far as I know, this
is the most comprehensive collection of Japanese applications for patents and utility
models available online for free. In the Japanese part of the website, Japanese
patents are listed from the year Showa 46 (1971) for unexamined (Kokai) patents
and from the year Taisho 11 (1922) for examined (Kokoku) patents.
But My Favorite Website for Foreign Patents is the EPO Website
The second website, one that is frequently used by US patent lawyers (I found out
about this website one day when I was identifying Japanese patents in a lawyer's
office), is the website of the European Patent Office (EPO) at http://www.espacenet.com.
If for some reason your browser refuses to take you there, go to my website at http://www.japanesetranslators.com
(or http://www.pattran.com), click on buttons: HELPFUL LINKS -> EUROPEAN PATENT
OFFICE -> PATENT SEARCH (bottom line) -> ACCESS esp@cenet via the EPO. This
will take you to the QUICK SEARCH page. This is an extremely useful page for me
because I can use it not only to search for and to display the patents that I need
to translate, but I can also search here for other information in a number of languages.
For example, I can type the words narrow-band beam expander or a German compound
word such as Kabelsatz in the field Simple Text to display hundreds of patents in
various languages that I can use as reference to track down the proper term for
a certain technique. Several hundred to thirty thousand or so patents will be usually
identified in one hit, although the system can display only the first five hundred
patents. Or I can type the name of the company in the field Company name to display
other patents filed by the same company. Because Japanese and German companies file
the same patents in America and in Europe in English and in various European countries
also in other languages, I can sometime find a very similar patent dealing with
a very similar technique which has the precise terms that I am looking for in English
or another language. This sometime saves my life when a Japanese patent uses transcription
into katakana (one of two Japanese alphabets used, along with Japanese kanji characters
which are of Chinese origin). The problem with transcription of foreign words into
Japanese is that since the original spelling is lost in Japanese, you either know
what the original word was, or you don't. And if you don't, it may be very hard
to figure it out from the mutilated form resulting from a transliteration that fits
the Japanese phonetic system, which has only a limited number of sounds. And because
the transcription provides no indication as to which language the original word
was in or whether it is a personal name or a common word, it can be very difficult
to track down such a word.
Will Japanese Patent Lawyers Ever Learn That "Anaguro" Is Wrong?
In addition, Japanese patent lawyers who write patent applications also sometime
make mistakes and they frequently transcribe foreign words incorrectly. This is
sort of understandable because a foreign word is just a foreign word to those busy
Japanese patent lawyers and they don't really care what the correct spelling is
as long as they know what the word means. I remember for instance how an in-house
Hitachi patent lawyer (lets's not name names here—I have not sunk that low
yet) kept using in an old Hitachi patent application the word "anaguro"
instead of "anarogu" which is the correct transcription for the English
word "analog". Obviously, analog is a very easy word to figure out, even
if the transcription is wrong. But what about for example the word "purikahsahtoh"?
It did ring a distant bell when I saw it recently in a patent opposition brief,
but since I had not dealt with patents in this field (spinning techniques for multi-filament
fibers) for several years, I could not remember what it meant. But when I ran a
search on the EPO website for other patents filed by the same company, after about
a minute of clicking on patents published in English, I realized that these were
two words: "purikahsah", which sounded at first like the name of an African
king to me, meaning "precursor", and that the second word "toh"
is "tow". Without the EPO website, I would have had to pore over a number
of Japanese-English and monolingual dictionaries for a long time, trying different
spelling combinations before arriving at the correct term, although I would have
recognized the term immediately of course ten years ago or so when I was dealing
with this field daily.
English Summaries on the EPO Website Can Also Be a Lifesaver
If I type the number of the patent application in the field View a patent application,
the EPO site will display an abstract in English first, usually from 50 to several
hundred words. This abstract is very useful not only because it gives me the terms
that a Japanese native translator, possibly a specialist in the field (whose English,
however, is often not very good) would use in this translation, but also because
the text in English also displays the names of the inventors transcribed into English.
As every Japanese patent translator knows, transcription of Japanese names is a
major hassle and it makes very good sense to have other people do this work for
us, especially if they do it for free and Japanese is their native language. I use
the EPO website not only to locate highly legible easily searchable copies of Japanese
patents, but also for German and French patents, most of which are also provided
with an abstract in English.
Second Plug for My Own Website
You can go from the EPO links or from the links on my website (http://www.pattran.com)
or (http://www.japanesetranslators.com) also to other national patent offices in
various countries. For instance the Czech Patent Office also has a similar search
engine that one can use to search for and display Czech patents. The patents are
stored here only in the form of abstracts (up to about two hundred words) and only
in Czech. However, because many Czech patents are owned by foreign companies, I
can often find a similar patent for instance in German on the European Patent Office
website if I have the name of the inventor or the name of the company, and this
will often point me in the right direction during a search for a proper translation
into English of an obscure term in Czech. For instance, dozens of patents for inventions
made at the Skoda Works factory in Pilsen, home of the original pilsner beer, are
owned by a Swiss company and are thus easily available in German.
Lonely Wolves Are Turning Into Lonely Eagles
Most translators of Japanese and German patents that I have met over the years tended
to be very individualistic and highly opinionated people who became freelance contractors
because they enjoyed the freedom that is available, at a cost, to those of us who
run a freelance business. Those who lived in large metropolitan areas, as I did
in the eighties and early nineties, had the luxury of being able to live the lifestyle
of their choice while at the same time they could also meet other translators at
regular meetings of groups of translators not far from their home. Translators who
lived far away from major metropolitan centers did not have the advantage of being
able to network with their colleagues as frequently.
The Internet has changed also this part of the equation. The lonely wolves who used
to live and work as freelance translators mostly in urban areas some 15 years ago
have often dispersed to other parts of the country where the real estate costs are
much lower and parking spaces are much easier to find. When I think of the group
of Japanese translators that used to meet in the house of Donald Philippi in San
Francisco several times a year until Don passed away in 1993, only a couple of them
or is still living in the San Francisco area. (There are three interesting interviews
with Don Philippi, who became the mentor of many Japanese translators on West Coast
in the eighties, on Don Philippi's memorial Web page http://www.jai2.com/dlpivu1.htm.
These interviews were conducted by Fred Schodt in 1984).
Some have moved to other parts of California, some to the Pacific Northwest, others
to the East Coast, Japan, and even Australia. We can all communicate by e-mail or
phone if we want to, but for some reason, we never seem to find the time to do that.
Many of the lonely wolves who used to congregate every now and then in packs of
translators, partly because this made it easier to hunt down the prey (translation
work) have turned into lonely eagles. Eagles don't need to hunt in flocks because
they have an excellent view from high up in the sky. We can see most of what we
want to see from the Internet—our new and very useful vantage point. So much
so that we don't seem to talk much to each other any more. Some translators talk
to other translators on online forums such as the Honyaku, LANTRA-L, or FLEFO, some
just lurk (i.e., read messages without ever posting), and others simply don't have
time for chitchat any more. This new, "informed isolation" is to me a
destructive part of the development brought about by the Internet.
The Internet Is Great for "Knowledge Workers"—But Only If They Really
Know Something
However, for the most part, the Internet has created a better world for technical
workers ("knowledge workers"), including translators of patents from Japanese,
German and other languages. It provides an invaluable reference tool for us when
we are not sure what term to use, if we can only figure out where the right sources
of information are and how to search for information in those sources. And most
of the work that needs to be translated is available for downloading for free on
the Internet.
The Internet also provides an important direct link between freelance translators
and their clients. As one patent lawyer told me when I was identifying Japanese
and German patents at a law firm in the Silicon Valley: "Good, experienced
legal secretaries, researchers, and technical translators are very valuable to us
because they can save us a lot of time and money". In many cases, we can find
our customers in databases available for free online if we know who we want to work
for and if we can offer them the services they need. It costs me about 250 US dollars
a year to be listed in two national and three regional directories of translators
that maintain searcheable databases of translators online: the ATA (American Translators
Association) directory and directories of translators in Northern California, New
York, Washington D.C. and Prague. Potential customers can also access websites of
individual translators online if we make it easy for them to find us. The cost associated
with creating and maintaining a website is again quite reasonable, normally just
a few hundred dollars.
One of the places where the microcosm seems to converge with the macrocosm is now
clearly the Internet. It is estimated that by about the year 2005, the number of
people who are connected to the Internet will reach one billion and most of the
new digitally literate surfers will come from developing countries. It is a pretty
safe guess that instant access of so many people to patents will provide more high-octane
fuel for the fire of human inventiveness. The word patent, which comes from the
Latin expression litterae patentes, i.e., open letters or public documents, is now
regaining its original meaning online.
The ubiquity of the Internet is thus slowly shifting the balance of power in the
translation business away from brokers who simply resell stuff, all kinds of stuff,
without necessarily knowing much about the stuff that they are selling, to specialized
service providers who are able to provide added value because they know a lot about
the product that they are selling.
What more can we ask for?
This article was originally published at Translation Journal (http://accurapid.com/journal).
By Steve Vlasta Vitek