French Language Drama

I was going to post about the pros of working in-house at WIPO but, to be honest, they're pretty much the same as working in-house anywhere else. The only real difference is I can look at the patents to resolve any questions, and translators in other fields can ask the author, so it's not that special. This left me at a bit of loss for something to write about, so I thought I'd write a little about French.

Right now, I'm in Paris (one of the pros that I'm not talking about is paid holidays) and I'm currently living and working in a francophone part of Europe, so I'm being exposed to a lot of French but I should make it clear that, aside from some hazy recollection of study that I did many years ago and what I'm picking up now, I don't speak French. However, anyone with a decent working knowledge of English can probably read a fair bit in French, well I can, and I've noticed that, seen from from an English-speaker's perspective, French is very dramatic. I'm not talking about false friends, which usually have a completely different meaning, these are words that have a similar meaning but in a different register. To elaborate, in French, one does not ask a question, one demands (demander), it is not to enough to be sorry, you must be desolate (je suis desolee), the bus doesn't stop, it is arrested (arreter), these aren't words that everyone uses, the whole world (tout le monde) uses them. There are probably a lot more out there, these are just the ones I can remember without thinking too hard, and I know there are historical reasons for this and it's partly due to the close relationship between England and France and English and French, but still, it's a little amusing, n'est-ce pas?

As a side note, comparative forms can be made by adding the word 'plus' (more) or 'le plus' for the superlative. Is it just me or is that a little too close to Newspeak?

Translation a la OMPI

I've been at WIPO for about a month and a half now and I thought I'd write a little about translating there.

The first thing is to explain what gets translated. Every application has an abstract and one or two reports on the patentability of the invention (everyone gets one but you can pay extra and get a second one) and all of these are published in English, French and the language of the application (e.g. Japanese), so everything is translated at least once. Generally, I find reports to be easier because there are guidelines for writing them that I can look at, in English and Japanese, and there is a little more flexibility in translating them. Abstracts are more interesting, I think, because they tend to be more technical but they also need to be translated a bit more literally and they have their own quirks, which I will euphemistically call challenges. (Oh my, that links really well to my next paragraph. This is almost like proper writing.)

One of the challenges that I think everyone expects in this type of work is 'patentese'. To be honest, this isn't as bad as most people think. There are two things to keep in mind: no pronouns and only living things can take the possessive. It's the combination of these two guidelines, you can break 'em if you really have to but you shouldn't need to, that results in some truly ridiculous sentences especially if the invention in question has a long name. You end up with things like "the absurdly and overly-complicatedly named doohickey and the whatsit used therein" because you can't at "used in it" and it would be ridiculous to repeat the name. And so, 'thereof' and thereby' and 'therein' and words of that ilk are kept alive despite almost never being used in the real world and patentese is born. There is one more factor to patentese, which happens to be what I think is one of the biggest challenges of what I do and is the next thing I want to rant about. (What a coincidence, it's almost as if I thought about what I wanted to write and then planned for everything to link up.)

Japanese inventors are terrible writers. (Actually this probably applies to most languages and most fields, except maybe literature and that's a pretty big maybe, but this is what I have experience with so my statement stands.) For the most part, abstracts don't seem to be written; bits and pieces are copied out of the actual patent with the vague hope that it will make sense. As far as I'm aware there are no guidelines for writing abstracts but if there were they would be along the lines of the following.

Rule #1: Full stops are for wimps, if you don't have a page-long sentence, you're doing it wrong.

Rule #2: Every sentence must have at least three (3) embedded clauses, even if it is a list of two items.

Rule #3: You only need one subject regardless of how many verbs there are, don't bother making it clear which verb it belongs to, and even that one subject is optional.

Rule #4: There is NO rule #4!

Although, in all fairness I should say that some companies submit applications that are relative pleasure to translate. Sometimes they have as many as three or even four sentences.

One of the big advantages to working at WIPO is that I can look at the patent in these situations (which is not always particularly helpful), a luxury that freelancers don't have. But, I think I'll save the advantages for another post.

Hi, my name is John and I'm a translator

I started translating socially, at parties and things. I could give it up anytime I liked. And then I found myself translating all the time. it was all I could think about. I'd translate anything, I didn't care what. I even experimented with proof-reading...

This is, in fact, the first blog I've ever written, first blog post too, so I thought I'd start with a brief self-introduction and maybe talk a little about what I hope to achieve with the blog.

I'm a Japanese to English translator, albeit one just starting out. I have a Bachelor of biomedical science and a Bachelor of languages from James Cook University in North Queensland and a Master of Arts in Japanese interpreting and translation from the University of Queensland, which I just finished at the end of last year. Right now, I am in Geneva on a 3 month fellowship at WIPO. I think I would like to get involved in patent translation. It seems interesting and challenging, and I hear the money is pretty good. So far, my experience at WIPO has proved the first two points true. I'm also interested in scientific translation. I enjoy most fields of science and I've had some training in that direction.

As for what I hope to get out of the blog, at the moment, not much. I think it's likely that I will end up as a freelancer at some point (the idea of spending all day in my PJs has a lot of appeal) and I can see how a blog and a website could help to attract clients etc. but at this stage my goal is just to begin establishing an online presence and to take part in the online community. I'm not really sure if I have anything new to contribute but it may be interesting for others, and me, to watch the progress of someone just starting out. And if it doesn't work out I'll try to make sure my career crashes and burns in the most spectacular manner possible. It'll be funny.