The Concept of a Translator as a Data Input Clerk/Omniscient Miracle Worker Is Not Very Healthy

Contrary to popular belief, the life of a translator is not exactly a bed of roses and the remuneration for working until exhaustion to meet a tight deadline is usually not exactly a king’s ransom either, whether we are talking about highly specialized translators, or jack-of-all-trades translators who are often referred to somewhat deprecatingly as “generalists”.

In some respects it is much easier to translate highly specialized texts such as patents than other types of materials, for instance newspaper articles about …. well, anything. It may seem that translating a newspaper article should not be a difficult undertaking. It’s just a newspaper article, for God’s sake!

But it certainly can be quite difficult to translate even a seemingly simple text. If you don’t know anything about the subject of an article, you are likely to mistranslate something. Especially when translating from a language that is as ambiguous (compared to English) as Japanese, or even a much more straightforward language like French, German or Russian, you must  first find out everything you can about the subject of the article.

How much are translators paid for the time that they must first spend researching the subject of  their translation? Nothing, of course! They are normally only paid based on the number of translated words or “normative pages” as it is simply assumed that they are omniscient, i.e. that they know everything about everything, right away and in advance.

According to one part of this concept, translators are operators who, similarly to file input clerks, manually replace words in one language by words in another language. And although this is a relatively simple operation which is already being done by machines using software, human translators seem to be still for the time being slightly better at replacing words in this manner, so they probably deserve to be paid something for this work, although obviously not that much.

However, instead of a second or two, some “words” may require an obscenely huge amount of effort to locate their correct equivalent in another language.  For instance, let’s say that a word or personal name is incorrectly transcribed into another alphabet, for instance into Japanese or Russian. When this happens, and it happens all the time in Japanese patents, a search engine is completely useless.

What is the poor translator supposed to do in such a case? Who cares? The flip side of the concept is that the data input clerks called translators are at the same time expected to be omniscient miracle workers who must be able to figure out the correct answer each and every time within a split second for the equivalent of a few cents per word.

But that is not how things work. In spite of more than a quarter century of an almost daily struggle to find the correct terminology for every patent application that I am translating, I spend a lot of time researching the terminology for most of my translations.

Patent translators from languages such as Japanese, German and French are in  a way more fortunate than some of their colleagues because most current patent applications filed in these languages are already provided with a brief English summary. But these English summaries at the same time also complicate the situation because the people who wrote them in some cases did not do a very good job (possibly because they did not want to spend much time researching the terminology in both languages as they are paid by the word).

When an English summary of a German patent that I am translating says that “ein Durchbrennbereich” is a “blow region”, and “ein Auslösebereich” is a “tripping region”, should I stick to the terms used in this summary, although they don’t seem to be used in the same context in other patents written in English, or should I use “a burn-through region” and a “triggering region” instead? I think that I should do so because the words make much more sense to me in English, but what if the lawyers on the other side of Atlantic Ocean, or Pacific Ocean for that matter, have been discussing these particular technical issues based on the translation available to them from the English abstract that I don’t like?

And of course, English summaries of Japanese patents written by Japanese speakers whose command of English are usually much worse than those of translators whose native language is German or French. But I should probably still try to stick to the English terms provided  in the summaries, except when I think that they are just too ridiculous, because the English summaries may already be a part of conversation among patent lawyers in different countries talking to each other across geographical and linguistic barriers.

Another advantage of patent translators is that they can often use machine translations that are now available for many current patent applications. But this advantage is again a double-edged sword. Although these machine translations are usually much worse that even the worst human translations, the English terms used in them are now also a part of the conversation among people who can’t read the original language and who may ask me why is it that I dared to use a different term in my translation.

The thing is, there is no such thing as a perfect translation, or even a correct translation in many cases, depending on the definition of the word “correct”. It is true that something will be always left out in a translation, and some things will be added.

The concept of a translator as an omniscient miracle worker who should have been able to anticipate every question even before it is asked is a popular misconception.

It is very easy to discredit a translation, any translation, if that is what you set out to do. I am no expert on the Bible, but I do know that there are dozens of translations of the Bible into English alone.

Some of these translation must be closer to the original meaning of texts that were originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, and some of them probably have some or many mistranslations in them. And although many people may have different opinions one way or the other, nobody really knows for sure which is which, just like I cannot be absolutely certain that “burn-through region” is more accurate than “blow region”, and “triggering region”  is better than “tripping region”.