Is Machine Translation Making Experienced Patent Translators Redundant?

I can think of several trends that may be taking place at the same time. It is true that there have been improvements in machine translation (MT), improvements that are incremental rather that revolutionary, but still tangible. But the main change that I can see now is not in the quality of the MT software but rather in its availability. Omnipresence would be probably a better word to describe what happened to MT in the last few years.

While MT used to be available only for Japanese patents on the JPO website a few years ago, it is now easily accessible also on the EPO (European Patent Office) website and on the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Office) website. I can see on my dashboard that even my blog posts are frequently translated into languages such as Chinese, Korean, Croatian, or Portuguese. So it is no wonder that some clients are probably tempted to try to save money by using free MT rather than expensive and slow humans.

I think that this will be probably true in particular in certain fields and for certain languages. For example, the most important part of a chemical patent is the description of which components were reacted together, with what ratios and at what temperatures. This would be hard to mistranslate even with MT. You can get a basic understanding of a German chemical patent with MT and save thousands of dollars if all you need is some basic understanding of chemical reactions. It might not quite work that way for example with Japanese chemical patents because MT works much better with European languages that are similar to English, such as German or French, than for example with Japanese or Chinese.

There are basically two reasons why patents are translated: Either to determine existing technology, which is referred to as prior art, or to file a patent which was originally filed abroad in a foreign language in English.

A large percentage of patents that I have been translating from German this year were for filing rather than for research of prior art. I may be wrong here, but I don’t think that too many patent lawyers would be willing to risk using MT for filing purposes. A simple understanding of the gist of a patent would not be sufficient. If you want to file a version of a German patent application in English, you’d better have everything translated correctly and only an experienced human translator can do that.

Although one result of MT could be that some translators may have seen their workload significantly diminished, I believe that another result of easy access to MT will be more work for other translators. I don’t think that I have lost much work so far, if any, to machines. Even when I translate patent applications for information about prior art (conventional technology) which is still the majority of my work, I think that while translations of some prior art references may be cancelled based on information obtained with machine translation, new prior art literature may be also discovered through MT when it is listed in foreign patent applications, and if these documents appear to be important, a real translation will be ordered from a human translator.
It all depends on what it is that we translate. Machines equipped with MT software are suitable for translations that are relatively simple and not very important.

Call me crazy but I believe that for everything else, human translators will be needed for a few more centuries.

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