The Degree of Confidence in the Reliability of Machine Translation Remains Unchanged

This translation is machine-generated. It cannot be guaranteed that it is intelligible, accurate, complete, reliable or fit for specific purposes. Critical decisions, such as commercially relevant or financial decisions, should not be based on machine-translation output.

(A warning notice displayed prominently above the machine translation function on the recently redesigned website of the European Patent Office).

The European Patent Office recently updated the design of its search pages.

I remember two contradictory feelings that I had when I saw that the machine translation function improved quite dramatically on the European Patent Office (EPO) and Japan Patent Office (JPO) websites about 15 years ago. The first feeling was one of elation, when I realized how useful much better machine translations would be to this human patent translator.

The other feeling, however, was a feeling of dismay mixed with trepidation. Will my services still be needed if my clients can figure out the meaning of complicated sentences in patent descriptions from much more accurate machine translations? This second type of feeling was further aggravated by defeatist comments of some readers of my frequent posts about machine translations when I started my new blog, the one that you are reading now, about 10 years ago.

It actually annoys me when the European Patent Office, Japanese Patent Office or German Patent Offices website update their web pages, because I have to learn yet again new tricks to quickly achieve the same searching results that I have been used to having in a few seconds for a long time. Sometime it feels to me like they are doing it to me on purpose out of Shadenfreude.

Since I have also been putting links to various search functions of several major Patent Offices also on my website to facilitate searching for patents, for instance for legal secretaries and inventors, this means that I need to update the links again.

Having machine translations available for translation of patents is very useful to human translators for a number of reasons. Not only because we save time because translators can see based on the machine translations which technical terms can be translated in a certain manner, which is the most obvious advantage. Incidentally, it should be said that translators are nowadays more or less forced to use terms listed on the website, because these may be the only terms available to our clients, who may be sharing them with their clients.

An important advantage of machine translations is that while they always contain mistakes, they usually do not contain mistakes that are typically made human translators … precisely because they are created in a mechanical manner by machines using algorithms, without ever getting tired as a human translator would.

Mistakes that are typically made by human translators, including by this patent translator, are for example these:

1. Misreading a number, for instance misreading the number 3 as number 9 or vice versa.

2. Skipping a number, a word, or for instance an entire line with 5 to 10 words on it depending on the format of the patent publication, when the translator must continue translating despite being tired and then skips a part of the text and continues on the next (wrong) line.

3. Mistyping a word without realizing that the wrong word has been used.

There are quite a few mistakes human translators sometime make, especially when they are very tired, for example when a client insists on a rush delivery. But despite the fatigue caused by rush work that is often inevitable, a good human translator should be able to catch all of his or her mistakes later during the proofreading phase, preferably after a good night’s sleep.

Machines don’t make these mistakes because unlike humans, they never get tired. Machines keep mechanically processing the texts for as long as they’re turned on. Humans always get tired after working for a certain period of time, and that’s when mistakes like this start creeping in.

But even after more than half a century of constant and clever improvements in the development of machine translation, the designers of machine translation packages seem unable to fix the same dumb mistakes that machines do, obvious mistakes that from the perspective of a human translator would seem inexplicable.

I will point out only one particular problem here, a problem that is often overlooked in patent translations, to keep my post short and sweet today.

Apart from obvious errors, such as when a completely nonsensical word is used for a particular technical term when an algorithm goes haywire for some reason, it often happens especially in long patents that the same terms indicating the same parts or elements of the invention are very often translated with different terms. This must be very confusing because it is then not clear to the reader of patent specifications whether these are the same or different parts and elements, which is one reason why a patent translation is then unreliable, even if it may be understandable.

While obvious mistakes can be easily fixed by a human ‘post-processor’ with so called ‘post processing of machine translations’, a technique enthusiastically embraced by some translation agencies as a time and money saving technique, the truth is that an extremely time consuming process, in fact so much so that proper “post processing” would take longer, often much longer, than a complete retranslation from scratch.

The problem with the ‘post-processing’ is that it can be only done by a human translator, as we cannot expect a faster computer equipped with better software and better algorithms to fix the mistakes that often occur in the machine-translated text. To do something like that properly means that the fixing would need to be done by a qualified and knowledgeable human, who unlike machines, who unlike a computer understands the meaning of the translation.

Machine translation software can only find similar texts that have already been translated by a good human translator and insert them into the machine translation output at lightening speed. That is why the translation may look very good. But unfortunately, or in fact fortunately for translators like me, because even a very similar translation will not be exactly the same as a previous real (i.e human) translation, in fact the very opposite might be meant by a very similar text, ‘It cannot be guaranteed that [a machine translation will be] intelligible, accurate, complete, reliable or fit for specific purposes [and why] … Critical decisions, such as commercially relevant or financial decisions, should not be based on machine-translation output.’

In other words, machine translation is an excellent, time and money saving solution … but this solution can be used only if it does not matter that the machine translation may have the opposite meaning than- that of the original text.

Although thanks to much improved software design, machine translations look often now like real translation, because the degree of reliability of a machine translation has hardly improved over the last half a century at all, they should be only used when the reliability of the translations is not really an issue.