Note: Because the
information provided on the websites of patent offices
of countries listed in my articles is being constantly
updated, the URLs listed in my articles may be obsolete.
Current links to search pages of patent offices
that can be used as interactive context-based dictionaries
are also available on www.PatentTranslators.com
or www.TokkyoHonyaku.com.
Part 1 of this article, also available on
this website, described techniques for using the
Japan Patent Office website as an online Japanese-English
and English-Japanese interactive dictionary. Part
2 will look at websites and techniques that can
be used in a similar way for translation into English
of patent applications published mainly in German
and French, but to some extent also in other European
languages.
A hundred years
ago or so, there was basically only one way to learn
a trade. If you wanted to become, say, a bookbinder
or a violin maker in a European country such as
Italy or Germany, you had to become an apprentice
in the workshop of an established master, which
meant that you basically had to work for room and
board for a number of years for a stern and stingy
master bookbinder or violin maker. After the required
number of years, you would learn all there was to
learn from one of the masters - apprentices often
went to different masters, sometime in different
countries, to learn their trade. If you were any
good and not too ugly, you would probably eventually
marry the master’s daughter and buy him out so that
he could retire (according to an old Czech proverb
that was something of a consolation to me when I
was a teenager, a man is handsome if he is not quite
as ugly as the Devil himself). It was not a bad
system for the 18th or 19th
century. But Internet is a much better system for
finding information, in particular when it comes
to learning the ins and outs of the relatively recent
trade of technical and patent translation of patents
in German, French and other languages. That is because
translators of foreign patents into English, especially
those translate patents from German and French to
English, can compare different translations of technical
terms on websites that are accessible to anyone.
Even as recently
as about a decade ago, relatively few English summaries
of foreign patents were available online, mostly
only from Japanese and German to English, and before
Internet became a second nature to so many people,
these summaries would be accessed for a fee basically
only from patent offices and not many people would
know about them besides patent lawyers. That has
all changed, of course, and we can now access information
in a number of languages almost instantaneously,
provided that we can read and write those languages.
The most commonly used website for
copies of patent applications that were originally
published in German, French, Japanese, or another
language is the European Patent Office (EPO) website.
Although the EPO website is very useful for translators
who need to find the full text of a patent in a
foreign language (including Japanese and sometime
also other languages) in PDF format, the disadvantage
of this website is that it can be searched only
in English in the English interface. It is possible
to “guess” a term in English and enter the term
in the search page at: http://ep.espacenet.com/
in order to display English summaries of German
or French patents to locate a technical term in
this manner, but this can be a very time consuming
task. If you are looking for a translation of a
German term into English, it is much easier to use
instead the German interface version on the EPO
website at: http://de.espacenet.com/
(which, incidentally, also provides a German interface
to national patent offices of some other European
countries, searchable to some extent also in French),
the quick search page of the German Patent Office
(GPO) at:
http://depatisnet.dpma.de/,
or you can try the website of the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO) at: http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/en/.
The EPO search page above (de.espacenet.com) can
be searched in German and after a few clicks also
in French, and both the GPO and the WIPO websites
listed above can be searched both in German and
in English. Although only a relatively small portion
of published German patent applications has been
provided with English summaries available on the
GPO website (in contrast to that, all Japanese unexamined
patent applications are provided with an English
summary), if the patent has been published in German
as a PCT application, it will always have an English
summary and unlike English summaries provided for
Japanese patent applications, English summaries
of German applications are almost always written
in good and clearly understandable English. One
disadvantage of the GPO website is that translators
will initially waste some time clicking through
several pages to arrive at the quick search page
because every search must be started as a new session
after several questions have been answered. Because
it takes a little bit more time to find what you
are looking for on this website, compared for example
to the de.espacenet.com or WIPO website, I usually
search for English equivalents of German technical
terms first at the de.espacenet.com website or WIPO
website to save time. On the other hand, an advantage
of the GPO website is that it is has a very comprehensive
database of German patents and utility models and
it can be also used to locate patents published
in other languages, such as Japanese or French,
since a number of options are suggested to users
to facilitate access to patent databases of different
countries on this website - from AU for Austria,
CZ for Czech Republic, DD for former East German,
DE for Germany, US and ZA (which is South Africa).
This is in fact a very useful feature and I sometime
end up on the GPO website when I am looking for
example for something in Japanese, Czech or French
if I am unable to find the terms (or the name of
a company or of an inventor) on another website.
Because every website has slightly different input
parameters for searching, it is kind of hard to
remember which website you are on and which parameters
should be used once the hunt fever sets in. So sometime
I simply give up on trying to figure out what kind
of a stupid mistake am I making again and go to
a different website.
The WIPO search
page is particularly useful to translators who handle
more than one pair of languages because text can
be entered in English, German, French or Spanish.
I often use this site to locate and compare English
translations of terms in French and German. The
WIPO interface is very simple and very fast, especially
when you need to switch back and forth between English
and French - all you have to do is click on the
British or French flag. While the capability to
recognize input in several languages is the main
advantage of the WIPO website, its main disadvantage
is its relatively limited coverage because only
PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents are included
in its database which goes back only to January
1997. This means that relatively older terms that
are no longer used much may not be included in this
database. Older German terms can be found on the
German Patent Office website (Depatisnet). I also
use mostly the WIPO website to search for English
summaries of patents published in French. I was
using the French Patent Office (INPI) website for
this purpose for quite a few years, but because
as of 2004, the French Patent Office website requires
users to register, establish an account and pay
a fee, I no longer use this website.
Translators of
patents from German and French to English thus have
a number of very useful websites of national or
multinational patent offices providing the text
of patent documents in the original language, sometime
with an English summary. Again, the most useful
and comprehensive website for identification of
legible original documents is in my opinion the
EPO website. However, the website seems to go through
a major change every couple of years or so. These
changes can be frustrating because all of a sudden,
the URL is changed and you have to find the new
one, or PDF files may no longer be displayed and
printed, for instance if you switch your browser
from Internet Explorer to Netscape or Mozilla Firefox,
but they do improve the functionality of the site,
once you get used to them. One useful option, added
recently to the EPO website, is the ability to specify
“Include Family” in the “Number Search” (the GPO
website has the same feature). This feature can
be used for example to identify an original patent
on which an application filed in another country
is based.
Let us say, for
example, that a patent publication that was published
originally in German was later modified to comply
with the requirements for patent claims in United
States and published later in a modified form in
English. Translators often receive requests for
translation of claims only in similar cases, because
the law firm needs to know the exact wording of
the new claims in a different version of the patent,
filed in a different version in a different country.
You can find the entire family of related patents
if you mark the option “Include Family”, in the
“Number Search” option on the EPO website, which
may include patent documents in English, German,
Russian, French and Japanese (for example). This
option is also useful when you are establishing
the terms that you will be using in your English
translation if you happen to know several languages,
because you can look at the same term, for example,
in Japanese, French and German, before you make
up your mind as to which English term you want to
use.
Also, regardless
of whether you are using the EPO website (in English
or with the German interface at de.espacenet.com
website), or the GPO or WIPO websites, your browser
and Adobe software, which is linked to your browser,
may or may not work unless you are using Internet
Explorer. This also means that you may or may not
be able to print PDF files unless you are using
Internet Explorer. That is why it makes sense to
keep a copy of IE on your computer for this purpose
even if you mostly use another browser. Another
problem are special characters (such as accent grave
in French or sharp S in German). But the foreign
term will be usually accepted without the diacritics
and/or special accents on most websites (and double
s for sharp S and two vowel combinations for umlauts
in German should also work). If not, my only recourse
is to Google the word in German, French, etc., until
I find it displayed with the proper characters and
accents and then cut and paste it into the search
field. It also works for Japanese once you tell
your operating system to recognize Japanese. Needless
to say, because Google can be used in a number of
languages, it can be also used to track down proper
spelling of names, such as company names which have
been transcribed into a different alphabet and thus
often rendered completely unintelligible, for instance
in Japanese or Russian. Once you have the name of
the company (which is usually the patent applicant)
and the name of the inventor, you may be able to
track down the foreign patent application that you
are looking for on the EPO website or on the GPO
website. However, you may have to install the German
or Russian keyboard, which is an option under Regional
and Language Options in the Control Panel in Windows
XP, if you run searches using words for instance
in German or Russian frequently.
Translators of patent applications
written in other languages than Japanese, German,
or French are less fortunate when it comes to existing
English summaries of foreign patents. Although basically
every country has a patent office website (and most
are listed on my website at www.patenttranslators.com/links.htm,
some national patent office websites are basically
designed for one function and one function only:
to facilitate payment of fees to the patent office.
No assistance whatsoever is provided to people who
are looking for free information. I tried to figure
out how to display a Chinese or Korean patent without
registering and paying a fee (through translators
from Chinese and Korean who sometime work for me),
but without any success. Neither was I able to find
a free copy of a patent in Russian or Czech on the
websites of the respective national patent offices.
Some help is available, again, from EPO, which provides
an interface in a number of languages to its vast
collection of patent applications in different languages.
The interfaces in various national languages are
listed in the table below.
However, the language support is limited
and a search can be run usually only in English
(except for de.espacenet.com which is can be searched
in German). Since the European Union has grown from
6 to 25 countries and more are scheduled to join
in the near future, patent translators can perhaps
hope that in addition to a common currency, common
laws, and a huge multilingual bureaucracy in Brussels,
patent offices of EU countries will eventually also
make it possible to search for terms in patents
published in a number of languages spoken in Europe.
The websites in the table above also have links
to various national patent offices in various countries
and it is possible that some of them already have
or will be adding a search capability for searching
in other languages than English, German, French
(and Spanish in some instances).
Unlike a few years
ago, patent translators now have access not only
to specialized technical dictionaries which they
must purchase, but also free access to websites
of national and multinational (EPO, WIPO) patent
offices, which can be in some cases searched in
several languages to display a summary in English
(EPO, GPO, JPO), or to switch with one click between
English and French summaries (WIPO). At first glance,
it may seem like a waste of time to research a single
word or a few words for quite some time in this
manner. After all, translators usually get paid
by the word, regardless of how much time they “waste”
doing their research online. But even though I sometime
spend a lot of time looking up a term in two or
three dictionaries and then end up looking up the
term again on two or three websites, I usually do
this only at the beginning of a translation. Also,
the fact that I can do so means that I don’t have
to limit myself to a narrow field. For example,
physics, chemistry, electrical and mechanical and
automotive engineering, mechanics, electronics,
optics, textiles – fields that I would call traditional
patent fields, are usually covered in a very comprehensive
manner in well known German dictionaries such as
Ernst (Dictionary of Engineering and Technology),
or DeVries (Technical and Engineering Dictionary).
But because these dictionaries are relatively dated,
they do not offer much help in fields such as biology
and biochemistry, medicine, data processing and
telecommunication, particle physics, artificial
intelligence, etc. – fields that I would call more
recent patent fields. Patent translators can and
should try to buy as many specialized dictionaries
as they can: for instance Langenscheidt’s Dictionary
of Chemistry and Chemical Dictionary, which combined
with Patterson’s Dictionary for Chemists and Dictionary
of Medicine and Pharmaceutics by Bunjes will cover
a lot of terms that are not included in Ernst or
DeVries. But a book is necessarily obsolete already
at the moment when it is published. The terminological
database that is available on websites of national
and multinational patent offices can be updated
on a daily basis.
I also think that
it must be boring to work in a narrow field, although
it must be more lucrative, provided that you have
plenty of work, if you are a specialist rather than
a generalist. The longest patent I have translated
so far was in a field in which I can translate often
without looking at any dictionary or website at
all. It had 155 pages of text and 25 pages of diagrams
and flowcharts. After the first 20 pages or so,
the work was really boring because the rest of the
patent was a tedious description of different combinations
of arrangements and embodiments of basically the
same thing and the main challenge was really paying
enough attention to what I was doing for long hours
from morning to night.
If I work in a
field that I am less familiar with, my daily output
is reduced by at least a half and after a few hours
I get very tired and need to take frequent breaks.
This is because learning new concepts and terms
in different languages involves a lot of heavy thinking
when new connections (called synapses) are created
between the neurons in our brain, sometime permanent
and sometime temporary ones (which means that you
have to open the dictionary or go to the website
again when you see the same term several months
later, although you remember that you encountered
that term before and it is just on the tip of your
tongue).
But to some people, patent translators
for example, learning new concepts and new terms
is a lot of fun because it requires a lot
mental input and heavy thinking. After all, isn’t
that what life really is all about?
