subject: How To Ease Patents Translation? [print this page] Scientific patents have generally a lot of formulas, numbers and repetitions and its a shame having to translate them without any help.
In this article, you can find some methods to ease your patents translation
Firstly, invest in professional OCR (optical character recognition) software. You can find many free OCR on the web but they do not work as good as professional ones. Remember that the pagination of this kind of documents quite often is not so good. Professional OCR software also has language dedicated character recognition, to improve the final outcome.
Use the software to read and convert the PDF document in an editable format. If the original text is good enough, you have a ready-to-translate document. Youll surely have to edit some parameters, but the better the original document, lesser post-editing job is required. Anyway, it is almost always worthwhile spending some more time on this kind of editing, since the result is that you can use a CAT to translate it.
Now you have the editable text, you can use your favourite CAT to translate it.
Apart from terminological consistency
You can benefit from repetitions and less than 100% match. Below are some examples you can find:
- Written formulas: if the OCR has done its job, you can just not translate them or do copy source into target.
- Figures on tables: the same as above. Remember to verify the exactitude of figures and formulas when doing the final reading/proofreading before delivering the translated text.
- Claims: they often are a repetition or nearly a repetition of the previous text.
- Laboratory procedures (for chemical/scientific patents): they often are quite similar if not the same. It is sufficient changing some figures or names
In addition, there are some typical sentences that repeat through the text and the CAT can help you in the first translation and in future ones. If you translate patents similar between them or related to the same argument, building a patent translation memory can help you saving time for future translations too, as you can find some similar or identical sentences. And the terminology is always consistent.
After translation you have to clean up the text and format it according to customer requirements. These tasks can seem to retard the translation time, but they can be a valid help to speed up the translation phase.
To further speed up your work you can use a speech recognition software, even if I can say, by my experience, that for chemical and scientific names it does not work so well, or at least it needs a great deal of training.
Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world wide.
