Miscellaneous · Terminology

How Can I Track Down The Examiner’s Name On A Japanese Office Action?

This question came up in a Facebook group for translators that I am following. It’s a good question. Japanese names can be notoriously difficult to pin down. The same kanji characters often have multiple possible readings when used in names, including some creative ones that you wont’t find in a dictionary.

But is it really necessary to translate the Examiner’s name? If you have been asked to translate an office action from Japanese into English, chances are that the purpose of this translation is to inform an overseas applicant or their patent attorney. In other words, an overseas company has applied for a patent in Japan, the examiner has issued an office action, naturally in Japanese, and now that company or their representative, who cannot read Japanese, want to now what the examiner says.

The name of the examiner is pretty much irrelevant in this situation, and I cannot imagine a situation in which it will be of interest to the reader. So what can we do?

A simple solution is to put in a generic substitute like this:

Patent Office Examiner: [Name of the Examiner]

An alternative solution might to include a foot note like this:

Patent Office Examiner: Masanori KUBO*

* This rendering is the translator’s best guess. The correct transliteration might differ.

If, for some reason, you need to get it right, it might be possible to track down the name by trying to look them up on social media or even calling them (the Examiner’s phone number is usually listed at the bottom of the office action), but this is not a productive use of a translator’s time.

Of course, the same also applies to other personal names that you sometimes find on patent-related documents, such as inventors’ names on the front page of patent applications.

Miscellaneous · Terminology

密着 – Close Contact and Avoiding the Same

CloseContactBlue

The word 密着 comes up all the time in patent translation and is often a challenge to translate. The go-to translation that many patent translators use is “close contact”, but that is problematic, because this expression is often objected to as unclear by the examiner when used in the claims – maybe rightly so. What does “close contact” mean anyway? Is there a difference between “close contact” and other kinds of contact? Isn’t contact by definition close? This expression doesn’t make too much sense if you think about it.

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Miscellaneous · Terminology

“Half-Liquid” Can Be Fully Unclear

addiction antibiotic capsules cure

It does not happen too often that a patent is declared invalid by the CAFC due to a translation mistake, but this is what happened in  IBSA Institut Biochemique, S.A. v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. Quite a bit has been written about this decision already (for example here and here and here), so I will concentrate on some translation-related aspects of this case.

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Grammar · Machine Translation & AI · Terminology

考えられない! – It is not considered!

Ai

Poor translations are the bane of patent attorneys. – At my patent law firm, we often translate patent applications from English into German and then file them with the German Patent and Trademark Office. Sometimes the English is already a translation from Japanese. The other day, one of our translators complained about the poor quality of just such an English translation that he, in turn, had to translate into German. He said that many passages of the English text were so mangled that he had to resort to Google Translate and feed it the original (a Japanese WO publication that he could not read) in order to make sense of the English translation provided by the client.

That got my attention. Could it be that we have reached the translation singularity, where Google Translate outperforms human translators?

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Basics · Grammar

Sometimes the Small Words are the Most Difficult to Translate…

vivid autumn leaves scattered on ground

It was November 18, and my secretary came to me in a bit of a panic. We had just received a new order for filing a patent application from one of our Japanese clients, which included the following English instructions:

Please file this application in the middle of November!

My secretary was worried, because the instructions seemed unclear and ambiguous to her and we were already 18 days into November. What does “middle of November” mean? November has 30 days, so the middle is exactly Nov. 15, isn’t it? But that day was already in the past.

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Grammar

Aが形成されたB

green computer circuit board

Today we will take a closer look at passive constructions of the above type. Let’s start with an example phrase in Japanese and three different possible English translations:

導電パターンが形成された回路基板

a) a circuit board that is formed with a conductive pattern

b) a circuit board on which a conductive pattern is formed

c) a circuit board that is provided with a conductive pattern

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Basics · Grammar

The three dimensions of patent translation

geometric mosaic ornament on tiled floor

There are many ways to translate a Japanese sentence into English – at least if it’s a sentence of sufficient complexity and length. When translating, we can optimize for three different qualities:

  • Accuracy
  • Readability
  • Checkability

The following is my take on these three different qualities and the role that they play in patent translation. Let’s go through them one by one.

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