Post-Editing of Machine-Translated Patents by Human Translator Would Be Tantamount to Committing Professional Suicide

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Many people who have never translated a patent have the wrong idea about what patent translation involves.

They often think that every patent is pretty much the same kind of very technical, dry, and boring document, a relatively simple thing from a language standpoint if the technical terms are known, that should be ideal for processing with Computer Assisted Tools (CATs), or even for “translating” with machine translation, which can then be “post-edited” by a human translator.

Put your CAT to work, or “translate” the dry, boring and highly repetitive uninspiring piece of technical writing with machine translation, and then you should be able to edit it with the CAT or machine translation product relatively easily.

That is what some people think, including translators, although only translators who do not translate patents, which is the majority of them.

I am not surprised that project managers working for translation agencies in translation industry 2.0 misunderstand what patents are and how they can be translated, because let’s face it, most of these PMs don’t know anything about translation, especially those who work for large predatory translation agencies intent on maximizing their profits ad infinitum at the expense of translators.

What I find surprising is that even translators who translate other fields seem to think that patents are eminently suitable for processing by machines and software. There are some patent translators who use CATs, and some swear by their darling CATs, but I am not one of them.

I don’t trust CATs to not make major errors that I may or may not be able to catch if I try to “produce more words per day”, and I happen to know that my customers don’t want me to use them. In fact, although many translation agencies love it when their translators use CATs because they are such convenient tools to control translators, most direct customers would stop sending me work if they thought I trusted a software tool not to mess up a patent translation.

Although I use machine translations of patents frequently, more or less every time when I can use them, I am aware of the many pitfalls of machine translations of patents.

Machine translations of patents have been available on the websites of organizations such as EPO (European Patent Office, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Office), or JPO (Japan Patent Office) for about two decades now.

I usually try to locate a machine translation of a patent document and when it is available, I print it out and look at it, especially as I start translating the document.

But I happen to know that trying to edit machine translations of patents, namely the kind of “post-editing” the translation industry 2.0 recommends and believes in with all of its greedy heart, would be tantamount to committing professional suicide for human translators.

Although a machine translation of a patent may look like a real translation that has been done by an experienced human patent translator, it is nothing of the sort.

It is important to keep in mind that machine translations are simply matched segments of translations that were originally provided by human translator, which is why they look like real translations. These segments are matched based on a text that is produced by the machine translation software, but they are not actual translations of real human translators.

And although large segments of the original patent document may be translated seemingly well by the software, every single word that was processed by a software package would still need to be validated by a human translator to avoid the many pitfalls of machine translations.

Because this is extremely time-consuming work, the “time savings” loudly celebrated in the propaganda of what I call translation industry 2.0, are only a propagandistic illusion.

Some errors due to mismatching or other glitches and errors of machine-translated segments would be easily identified by a human translator during “post-processing” because they are simply too ridiculous given the context of the document.

But mistranslations that seem perfectly or somewhat plausible in the context of the document may be very difficult to detect, even by an experienced and qualified human translator, even though they may be completely wrong.

For example, I have noticed on many occasions that the machine translation software that is used on the European Patent Office or WIPO Office websites sometimes mismatches entire segments of documents, or the machine translation may be based on the wrong version of the documents when there are several versions of “the same document.”

This does not happen that much in the main text of the patent application, called “Description” in English. Machine translations of the segment called “Description” usually only contain the mistakes that we generally associated with typical machine translation software glitches. But it does happen quite frequently with the section of the patent application called “Claims”, which is the section that basically identifies what is new in the patent based on existing technology, or what is called prior art.

The reason for this is simple. When a new patent application is filed, it is first examined by patent office examiners who accept the new invention as “patentable”, but only with the provision that the claim section needs to be changed and the application must then be resubmitted to the patent office, usually when the claims are overly broad, or not clear enough.

This means that some claims are deleted, some may have to be rewritten, and new, more restrictive claims are added.

And because the patent application may be returned for new formulation of claims several times, the software used by the patent office could then be using an older version of the document which still contains the claims that were rejected by the examiners, but which are no longer relevant.

The content of the new claims will then be completely unrelated to what the machine translation spits out and even the number of claims is usually different.

Translation industry 2.0 likes to celebrate new tools such as CATs and machine translation as revolutionary, “disruptive technology” that will completely change the way translations are produced and delivered so that eventually, these tools may for the most part replace human translators, the way video streaming replaced DVD rentals, or the way Uber is slowly replacing traditional taxi services (and self-driving cars may eventually replace Uber and Lyft).

But they either don’t understand or pretend not to understand that translation tools—wonderfully helpful and exciting as they are, especially for us, translators—will never be able to replace the minds of human translators.

The only “tool” that, unlike software, is able to be actively engaged in intellectual activity that can create real translation is the human mind. And this is true not only about literary translation or financial documents, but also about translations of the dry, highly technical and sometimes boring documents called “patents”.

It so happens that tools, including software tools, are and always will be only tools.

And no matter how helpful, useful and innovative these tools are in the hands of translators, despite what the many smarmy vendors of snake oil in translation industry 2.0 with big dollar and Euro signs in their eyes try to make us believe, these tools will never amount to a suitable replacement for intellectual activity that is required for a real translation, and especially for translation of patents, which are also referred to as intellectual property.