Category: Articles for Patent Professionals

Over the past few years I have been asked to speak to translators’ associations in Washington State and Oregon, as well as nationally via an American Translators Association webinar on the subject of translating documents for use as evidence in US courts. Best practices for spoken interpretation have long been established at both the state […]Continue reading

The EPO Patent Translateservice, powered by Google translation engines, has been one of the greatest boons of all time for prior art research. With the adoption of neural machine translation last year, the nearly instantaneous machine translations have become far more readable and have all but done away with the “gobbledygook” phenomenon that spoiled earlier […]Continue reading

A monolingual attorney’s guide to challenging an erroneous translation   Most patent attorneys have seen their share of sketchy translations. Machine translations routinely end up in prosecution histories and, on occasion, are even submitted to court. Likewise, translations produced with more concern for price and speed than expertise, which may have been suitable for getting […]Continue reading

A monolingual attorney’s guide to determining the accuracy of a translation Patent attorneys may have concerns about the accuracy of a translation for any number of reasons. Your suspicions may have been raised by the warning signs described in the previous installment of this series. You may just have a hunch that something is not […]Continue reading

A Monolingual Attorney’s Guide to Assessing the Reliability of a Translation Patent attorneys are increasingly aware that translations can be challenged in litigation, IPR proceedings, and even USPTO prosecution. Even if you are careful to source expert translations for foreign language documents that land on your desk, some cases come with their own translations. Attorneys working on litigation often […]Continue reading

Recently, I had the honor of being invited to talk about translation in the New York University SCPS Masters in Translation program, as a guest author in Francoise Herrmann’s Patent Translation course. The students in this class came prepared with many questions that impressed me with the depth of thought that they demonstrated. One question, however, posed by Emily […]Continue reading

“In the end, isn’t translation a matter of personal opinion?” The question was thrown at me by an attorney for the other side who hoped what she was saying was true. If it were, and translations could only be evaluated in the same way we make decisions about fashion or flavors of ice-cream, then the one […]Continue reading

I recently had the honor of writing an article titled Translating Patents: Issues in Prosecution, with Bruce C. Hamburg, a partner at Jordan and Hamburg, which was published in the New York Law Journal. You can read the article here.

I have written an article on translation policies in patent practice for the Westlaw Journal (formerly Andrews Litigation Reporter) covering cost mitigation, risk management and translation management in litigation. You can read it here, where it is Reprinted with Permission © 2010 Thomson Reuters.

… when will they get around to it? Recently I have been reviewing new entrants to the Computer Assisted Translation market. If you read that stuff you will have noticed a jaded and dissatisfied air to my comments. The truth is, I have been waiting, for some time, to be made at least quasi-redundant by a […]Continue reading

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