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.