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JAT Bulletin 175, October 1999

Several years ago when I was approached to participate in the ATA Patent Translation Handbook, I saw it as an excellent opportunity--not only to impart what knowledge I had about the subject of J-E patent translation, but also to learn what I didn't know about while I was writing. Additionally, it turned out at the time (and remained true until the appearance of the ATA Handbook) that there was virtually nowhere for the J-E patent translator to turn for advice, short of phoning up or e-mailing a colleague.

Being published in the US, however, the ATA Handbook naturally devotes most of its pages to the issues of tightly rendered for-information translations, as they are usually executed in the US for use in litigation or other reader-driven situations. There remained a need for a more comprehensive work addressing the issues of the type faced by patent translators in the very different J-E patent translation market of Japan.

My participation in the Handbook project was limited to Chapter 5, which addressed the rather special issues of J-E patent translation for filing. Since then, I have continued to augment Chapter 5 of that work in the form of my Guide to J-E Patent Translation for Filing . Still, there is a lot more that could be said about this topic, and getting more hands and minds on the project arose as a good approach to covering this topic with more depth and breadth than I alone would be able to achieve.

Several JAT patent translators have been talking about producing a series of articles addressing the issues facing translators who produce J-E translations of patent specifications for filing outside Japan, and at present it appears that at least Friedemann Horn and I will be embarking on a series of articles that delve into the varied problems that arise in this field.

Some of the topics that we might be setting our sights on are:

• The mandate of the patent translator and the translator-practitioner relationship in Japan
• The overall structure and re-ordering of the specification sections required for US patent specification preparation
• Introduction to patent claim translation
• Changing an unstructured "sea-of-words" Japanese-language claim into a well-behaved and structured English-language claim that recites the same invention
• The handling of plurals; when is it acceptable to allow a plural?
• Indefinite and definite articles; when the definite article is acceptable with a first occurrence
• Devices used to identify similar but separate elements (e.g., ordinal designations and 一方 and 他方)
• Translation of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications in which the Japanese-language version has already been submitted to an overseas patent office

This is just a sample of some of the topics that come to mind. If readers have some topics they would like to see covered, suggestions are welcomed.

With a little bit of luck and a lot of perseverance, the series of articles to follow this brief teaser will develop into a more permanent JAT translation resource. Even if that longer-term goal is not achieved, the series of articles themselves should fill a well-defined need for discussion of the above-noted issues among patent translators.

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