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.