My name is Friedemann Horn, and I am a patent attorney based in Munich. I have been active in the field of intellectual property for almost 25 years, in which I have translated, checked and prosecuted thousands of patent applications. I started my career as an electrical engineer and in-house translator for a Japanese patent law firm in Osaka. The Internet had just been invented, but there were none of the online dictionaries, discussion groups and other resources like Wikipedia available that we have today. And while I learned a lot from my esteemed colleagues (inhouse translators and patent attorneys) at the time, I feel that I also had to reinvent the wheel for a number of issues. One objective of this blog is to pass on some of what I learned to further generations of patent translators.
After gaining a few years of experience in translation, I then founded Horn & Uchida Patent Translations Ltd., a translation house located in Osaka that specializes in the translation of patent applications between Japanese and English. I translated hundreds of patent specifications during that time, and also checked hundreds more that were done by inhouse translators as well as freelancers. That was a great experience, as it put me in the position to learn how other translators deal with the same problems I was tackling during translation.
After returning to Germany, I became a founding partner of Horn Kleimann Waitzhofer Patent Attorneys, a patent law firm based in Munich. Today, I divide my time between patent translation work at Horn & Uchida and patent prosecution at Horn Kleimann Waitzhofer, where my main focus is on representing Japanese clients before the European Patent Office. This often involves improving translations and thinking about the meaning of words.
So I have spent quite some time at the crossroads of translation and patents and worn a number of hats during that time, namely:
- Inhouse translator at a patent law firm
- Freelance translator translating for patent applicants and patent attorney clients
- Co-owner of a translation firm
- Translation checker
- Patent attorney filing patent applications and having to deal with the fallout of poor translations
Thus, I have the priviledge of actually seeing the fate of many translations – not just my own but also those of many translators from a wide range of backgrounds and qualifications – and what effect different word choices can have on prosecution. I get to see when an examiner misunderstands or misconstrues a certain phrase or expression, I get to see when a German translator does not understand the mangled English translation of a Japanese original, and I get to see that poor English leads to increased prosecution costs for the client because the examiner will issue more objections and the patent attorney needs twice the time to figure out the meaning of the English.
My primary concern in all this is to act in the client’s best interest. The client wants the best possible patent protection at a reasonable price and that is what we should strive for. This means that the translation should be accurate and easy to read, and I will give many examples of poor translations that do not satisfy these criteria. On the other hand, I don’t care about the translation checker and what they might think at all. In fact, in many cases, I am in the lucky position that I am the translation checker. I find that many patent translators tend to worry about the wrong issues. They spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about issues that are of no consequence at all, and sometimes not enough about the actual meaning of more important parts of the source and target text. So another goal of this blog is to put a spotlight on what is important and what isn’t.
Before starting this blog, I did some resarch to see if similar blogs are out there already. I did find a number of translation blogs, including some that are specifically about patent translation, but to my surprise, I found only few posts that give any guidance on how to translate better. Most blogs deal either with the business side of translation (how to get clients, how to market yourself, how to write invoices, insights into specific industries and so on) or the lifestyle of translation (how to maintain the right posture, how not to go crazy as a freelancer and so on), but I haven’t discovered any that discuss the pros and cons of different possible translations or give examples of good and poor translations. At least I haven’t discovered any blogs like this for J-to-E patent translation. This blog is also an attempt to fill this gap.
I value your feedback. If you have any suggestions or questions, please let me know. You can either comment in the posts directly, use the contact form or write me an email.
Thanks for stopping by!
Friedemann Horn