Recently more and more people are afraid that due to the improvement of AI translators will lose their jobs to machines. In this article, a veteran patent translator will explain his opinion on this regard. The author as experience working as a German Japanese patent translator in patent firms for over 30 years. He mainly translates patents in the engineering field from German to Japanese.

The development of patent translation

 When I started working as a patent translator, translation was done by handwriting. Every translator used their favourite pen and wrote the translation word by word. A typist would then type the text so it could be submitted to the patent office. I was translating chemistry patents at that time and specifications with over 100 pages were quite common.

With the arrival of the word processor the keyboard became the main tool of a patent translator and later as PCs became commonly used, we started to use mice as well. With the popularization of the internet research could be done online and books became less important. Now we live in an era when even the actual translation work can be entrusted to machines. At first, I thought that machines would make the lives of translators a lot easier but when you look at the actual results of machine translation, but I had spoken too soon.

How machine translation is used in patent translations

Recently you can see a lot of magazine articles and online articles talking about machine translation and evaluating the translation results. There are also many reports focusing on patent translation. The consensus seems to be that you can only use it for translation required for patent research. But we also know that with the support of a human translator machine translation can achieve decent quality levels.

At the Nippon Intellectual Property Translation Association (NIPTA), that transeuro is a member of, there is a working group studying the use of machine translation with regard to patent translation. They have unique approaches like letting a machine translation translate problems of the NIPTA examination for patent translators and evaluate the results.

About the writing manual for patent translation

The interesting point is that in the case of Japanese-English translation the quality of the machine translation result can be improved drastically depending on how you write the source text in Japanese. The task of adjusting a text for machine translation is called pre-editing. The Japan Patent Information Organization（Japio）has published a writing manual for patent translation aimed at patent attorneys. It explains how to write a Japanese patent specification so that it can be translated more accurately by a machine translation software.

When looking at this manual I noticed that if you write a Japanese specification according to the manual the result will be very similar to a Japanese translation of a foreign patent specification. A Japanese translation of a foreign patent specification uses very detailed and accurate expressions to avoid misunderstandings.

There is always a subject and an object and the overall grammar and writing style is close to English. Also, when talking about means the manual advises to use the particles “ni yotte” or “wo mochite” instead of “de”.

Machine translation has problems to differentiate whether a Japanese “de” is used to express a place or to express means. Just like we patent translators translate “mit (with)” or “durch（by)” as “ni yotte” the manual teaches you how to write Japanese with the English translation in mind. If you write a Japanese specification according to the manual it will turn out just like a Japanese translation of a foreign specification.

With regard to Japanese-English patent translation, we can say that if you pre-edit the Japanese text according to the manual the quality of a machine translation improves greatly. Personally, I am afraid that if every patent attorney uses the manual to write patent specifications that all patent specifications will use the same Japanese and the patent attorneys will lose their personality. In the past, there were a lot of patent attorneys that used very unique Japanese expressions. At that time, they caused a lot of trouble for translators but remembering it now it feels quite nostalgic.

A tricky translation for DeepL

In Japan, you cannot find a lot of information about Japanese-German machine translation, which might be since the demand for German translation is lower. However, machine translation between German and English has improved surprisingly. The machine translation tool DeepL is one of the best examples. It seems to have enough skill to be used for patent translation. It might be possible to use DeepL to translation from German to English and use another machine translation to translate the English to Japanese. However in general I would not recommend to translate a translation especially not when using machine translation.

I gave DeepL a tricky translation to see how it performs.

・Eine Ummantelung des Kraftstoffeinspritzventils ist am Innenpol angespritzt.

（A sheathing of the fuel injector is moulded onto the inner pole.）

In the above German sentence, the “spritz” of Kraftstoffeinspritzventils means „injector“ but the “spritz” of angespritzt at the end means “injection moulded”. Both are derived from the word spritzen but have different meanings. Let’s see whether DeepL can differentiate these two correctly.

DeepL produced this result for the English translation.

・A sheathing of the fuel injector is sprayed on the inner pole.

The first “spritz” was translated correctly as injector but the second “spritz” was translated incorrectly as “sprayed”. That does not make any sense.

I tried the same sentence again but removed the Kraftstoff (fuel) of the word Kraftstoffeinspritzventil resulting in the sentence below.

・Eine Ummantelung des Einspritzventils ist am Innenpol angespritzt.

The translation result was as follows:

・A sheathing of the injection valve is moulded onto the inner pole.

This time the AI correctly translated the second “spritz” as “moulded”. I am at loss why the translation accuracy increased by changing Kraftstoffeinspritzventil into Einspritzventil but it seems that also for DeepL the accuracy improves if you adjust the source text accordingly.

If machine translation is on such a level it is sufficient when an experienced translator revises the result of the machine translation. This work process is called post-edit and necessary when using machine translation.

When using machine translation, you still need a human translator

Anyhow, at the current state, the AI of machine translation engines is not able to understand the technical content of a patent to the extent necessary for an accurate translation.

It is still too early to leave patent translation completely to machines. Especially when it comes to the engineering field where the logic and processes of how machines work are important, human translation far exceeds machine translation.
When using machine translation, you should always have a translator that is well acquainted with the field pre- and post-edit the text.

How can patent translators survive

In order to set human translation and machine translation apart, a human translator needs to have high skills. When it comes to patent translators, they need technical knowledge to profoundly understand the technical aspect of a patent as well as high text interpretation skills. If a human translator can’t tell „injector“ and “moulded” apart they are no better than the AI of a machine translation.

In order to survive as a human translator, high language skills and high technical skills are necessary. You must be better than a machine translation. This is the kind of translator that transeuro is looking for. If you want to become such a translator, we recommend our language school transeuro academy.

If you are looking for human translation that goes past machine translation or if you are aiming to become a translator that exceeds machine translation don’t hesitate to contact us.

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