One of the many challenges in IP work is
translation of foreign documents, especially patents. Translating between Chinese and
English is especially difficult for machine translation, where strange
or even nonsense results are common due to the complexity of Chinese and
the difficult legal and technical phrasing that is common in patents.
Google Translate is quite poor in this context, and the outstanding translation tools at Baidu.com also generally don’t work well for patents.
Fortnately, WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) has recently released a powerful tool specially for patent translation, WIPO Translate. The results have been stunningly good in my testing so far,
vastly outperforming prior systems.
WIPO Translate can handle a variety of language pairs both ways, all
involving English and either Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese,
Russian, and Spanish. Only about one paragraph at a time can be
translated, so you can’t yet dump an entire patent all at once into WIPO
translate. I hope that limitation will be lifted in the future.
In using the WIPO Translate tool, you can select a technical field to help
focus the translation and improve the chances of the appropriate
terminology being used.
