How did you get into patent translation?

[Shannon Spears]

Hello all,

I'm currently working as a medical translator (mostly journal articles) but have heard a lot of good things about patent translation and might want to pursue that course down the road. I know there are a lot of patent translators on the list, so would anyone be willing to share how they got started in patents (e.g., education, self-study, and work experience)? I would really appreciate it and I'm sure others here are interested as well.

Best,
Shannon Spears
JP>EN medical translator
sha...@eiyakunow.com

[Kevin Kirton]

Hi Shannon and honyakkers,

In my case, I did three years in-house at a translation company in
Kyoto that was a subsidiary for a biggish printing and semiconductor
company. That was pretty much a perfect introduction to general
translation because I was doing meetings and emailing in Japanese
every day for those three years, and there was even a budget for me to
buy books to study the field and do one of UCLA's online technical
editing courses.

Then I did one year in-house at a patent translation company in Osaka
and I have to be honest, like you, I had heard lots of good things
about patent translation, but my first year doing it was pretty hard.
There was a basically a new form of English I had to learn (patentese)
and compared to the fun and creativity of translating advertising
materials, patents were a bit dry. However, the people at that company
were excellent mentors and they gave me a great introduction to the
industry. Meeting up with other patent translators was also
invaluable. The patent translation scene in Osaka in the early
noughties was pretty active, lots of good seminars and interesting
speakers from Japan and overseas every month.

After a few years of freelancing I grew to like patents more and more
and I still keep up with patent news and developments just out of
interest. It's still a pretty stable and secure form of employment
compared to what I know some other translators have to put up with.

If you're doing medical translation you probably only need one good
client once you get established. I know translators who have worked
for many years for a single client. It's probably safer to have a few
though, naturally.

If working in Japan is not an option for you, your best bet is
probably to ask for a chance at freelance work with someone on this
list or the patent translator mailing list.

Kevin Kirton
Cooma, Australia

[Alan Siegrist]

Hi Shannon,

 

I studied physics, chemistry and math in high school, both in the US and Japan, and majored in physics in college in the US. Later, I got a job in Tokyo as a translator at an English-language science and technology magazine. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a large portion of the science and technology articles we published in the magazine were actually rewritten extracts of patent publications. So I got a lot of on-the-job experience translating patent-related documents, and also had the privilege of being able to interview the authors so that they could explain some of the complicated bits directly. This was very helpful. We also had very good editors at the magazine who pointed out problems with my translations.

 

Later, I became a freelancer and started translating patent documents themselves, and realized the similarity in style with the magazine articles.

 

Best,

 

Alan Siegrist

 

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[Jon Johanning]

Shannon,

I got started in translation in general in the early 1980s (which must make me a dinosaur) by translating journal articles on pesticide chemicals for the research wing (which no longer exists) of the Franklin Institute in Philly, because that was the job I found out about when I had just returned from studying Japanese in Japan and needed a job. That job got my name around the mostly local network of translation agencies (in those days, of course, without the Internet, most such networks were local), some of whom gave me patents to work on.

Not knowing anything about patents as such, I treated them as just another kind of technical documents, and learned about how to do them from experience. I would say that the most important qualification is being comfortable with technical/scientific materials, which I was. (I didn’t have any work experience in those areas, but I could understand the stuff pretty well.) I’m still trying to get used to the weird Japanese dialect they’re written in (as it seems to me, at least).

I must note that I translate “for information,” not “for filing.” That is, the clients receiving my stuff are U.S. companies and intellectual property legal firms who want to know the information in the bodies of the patents, not Japanese companies trying to get patents filed with the US Patent Office. If you’re doing patents for filing, you need to know a lot about the formal requirements for filing patents which I don’t know.

Jon Johanning // jjoha...@igc.org

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 4:21 PM, Shannon Spears <s.diane...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello all,

I'm currently working as a medical translator (mostly journal articles) but have heard a lot of good things about patent translation and might want to pursue that course down the road. I know there are a lot of patent translators on the list, so would anyone be willing to share how they got started in patents (e.g., education, self-study, and work experience)? I would really appreciate it and I'm sure others here are interested as well.

     I spent ~20 years (1980-2002) doing research in chemistry and the life sciences before switching careers and moving into freelance translation full-time.  11 years were spent at a major multinational chemical company, where I was involved in writing up patent disclosures (especially working examples) and claims for ag products inventions, along with the analysis of competitor patents to explore freedom to operate/creative patent poaching.  Many patents were in Japanese, and I was learning the language at the same time (courtesy of the Company).  When I began to appreciate the defects in the human translations we were receiving (not to mention the then new-fangled machine translations!), I started personally reviewing all the translated texts that were critical to my research, and later doing the most critical translations (claims, examples) from competitor patents myself.

     One instance that sticks in my memory was when one of the translators from the Company language services department misread 温室 (greenhouse, or "hothouse") for 室温 (room temperature) in the examples.  It sounded strange that the test plants were being raised "at room temperature" rather than "in a greenhouse"!  Kinda like mistaking housecat for cathouse!

     So, with my experience, patents seemed to be a natural type of translation for me to ease into, especially chemical patents.  I do "for information", "freedom to operate", and "for filing" translations, and always ask which one the client wishes to have done.

     One of my early clients (a patent law practice in Japan) recognized that I hadn't had a "classical" patent upbringing, and my contact suggested acquiring and reading "Landis on Mechanics of Patent Claim Drafting", which I dutifully did.

     Incidentally, if anyone is a member of Scribd, the entire text of Landis (copyright 2001) is available there gratis on a peer-to-peer sharing basis.

 

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[Jon Johanning]

On Dec 7, 2013, at 6:21 PM, Matthew Schlecht <matthew.f...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Kinda like mistaking housecat for cathouse!

There’s a gem of translation in itself!

Jon Johanning // jjoha...@igc.org

[Shannon Spears]

Kevin, Alan, Jon, and Matthew,

Thank you so much for your input. It's fascinating that you all seemed to take different paths to the same specialty. I'll keep that in mind when I'm wondering if I'm going in the right direction.