Beginning my career in the early days of the modern translation industry, I have been fortunate in terms of the training and mentorship that I have received along the way and, as partial payment on my debt of gratitude, I try to schedule regular speaking engagements. This year the pandemic got in the way of […]Continue reading
It is well known that the customer is always right but being right all the time can put you in a tough spot. When an attorney suggests a due date for a translation, service providers are unlikely to object or to question the decision-making process. This well-intentioned practice leaves some difficult decisions up to the […]Continue reading
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 use of plural and singular in translating Asian patents often requires careful consideration. With a few exceptions, such as “sheep” and “fish,” English nouns come in distinct single or plural forms. The separation is deeply tied into how we see the world and the grammar we use to describe it. Even with the exceptions […]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
Overseas clients can be a steady and significant income stream for US attorneys. Typically, foreign applicants, who have already begun prosecution in their own countries, require less hands-on management than domestic filers. Given the added difficulty of shopping for services across borders, they are also more likely to be loyal once a steady relationship has […]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
The Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society (NOTIS) and Seattle court interpreters will be hosting a day of workshops and panels on October 4th (first Sunday after International Translation Day) and have been kind enough to ask me to speak on translating for legal evidence. Evidentiary translation is an area in which translation (written) and interpretation (spoken) converge. As differs […]Continue reading
