Patent Translation: Worth Getting in to? Looking for Advice Thread poster: Isely Mills
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Isely Mills 
United States
Local time: 06:53
Japanese to English
Hello. I've been translating from JP>EN for about a decade now as a freelancer.
I'm interested in doing something to make more money than I am currently and it occurred to me that I could specialize a bit and demand a higher fee. I have done patent translation in the past, but I do not have formal training in the patent space.
My questions:
1) How is work in the patent space (frequency of work/rates)
2) How would one get into the space (what qualifications w... See more Hello. I've been translating from JP>EN for about a decade now as a freelancer.
I'm interested in doing something to make more money than I am currently and it occurred to me that I could specialize a bit and demand a higher fee. I have done patent translation in the past, but I do not have formal training in the patent space.
My questions:
1) How is work in the patent space (frequency of work/rates)
2) How would one get into the space (what qualifications would you recommend/should I stay independent or seek employment through a law firm or agency?)
3) Is this space being affected by MT?
Thank you in advance for your time. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:53
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
| Not an easy road | Mar 11, 2023 |
Isely Mills wrote:
I have done patent translation in the past, but I do not have formal training in the patent space.
I too have done a few patent translations, and there was a time back in 2015 when I considered making this one of my specialties, given that I am quite familiar with the technical aspects of several different industries (automotive, for example). I eventually decided against this for a number of reasons.
First, after going to a couple of seminars and talking to a few individuals involved in the field, it became clear to me that the people with whom I would have to compete were often those who had many years of experience in translating patents at lawyers/patent offices or even in Japanese institutions such as the JPO.
This matters, because - as you probably know - patents are not translated into normal/natural English: there are fairly rigid conventions to follow and they are not intuitive. This is nothing that cannot be overcome with hard work and study, but it is something to keep in mind if you don't want to make a complete hash of your projects when starting out. It also took me far longer to translate patents than my usual texts.
A related issue is marketing. if you are up against people who have been doing patents for 30 years, and are charging no more than you, or possibly even less (because they are more efficient) then it is going to be difficult to persuade clients to use you instead of them. How would you sell yourself and your services? Again, "difficult" does not mean impossible, but it is still something of which you should be aware before you launch yourself into the fray.
The other thing that concerned me at the time was that a lot of it seemed to be fairly repetitive, and this suggested that it was fertile ground for the application of machine translation. The extent to which MT has affected demand in this area and others is a subject of (frequent, noisy) debate in this forum and elsewhere, but it is a fact that machine-translated patents are readily available in this language pair. Particularly if you are translating patents only for information (as I was) rather than for the higher value-added process of filing or litigation, you may find it hard to differentiate yourself.
As for rates, I cannot say. One of the things that put me off was when a very experienced freelancer inadvertently replied to the whole mailing list when responding to a job offering, and the rate he offered to the client was noticeably lower than my minimum. Conversely, it might be more than what you are making at the moment; hard to say.
So, after looking at it in the round I concluded that patents didn't make sense for me personally given that I already had a couple of decent specializations. That doesn't mean patents would not work for you: individual effort and agency is everything, and you may be able to make it succeed where I feared I would fail and waste my investment of time and effort.
I think you would probably need to focus in certain areas, but that is my basic approach in any case. Having a specialist niche and some related expertise (whether in patents or some other field) helps in marketing, in my experience.
Regards,
Dan
| | | | | I agree with Dan | Mar 13, 2023 |
My last "proper" job in England was working for a firm of patent attorneys. The attorneys themselves had to undergo training that lasted years, and to pass difficult exams with a high fail rate, and one of the things they had to learn was the particuar language used in patent claims etc. I was not either a patent or trade mark attorney and was involved in the marketing/website side of the business, which involved a lot of writing, but not of any patent claims. The one thing I learned there that ... See more My last "proper" job in England was working for a firm of patent attorneys. The attorneys themselves had to undergo training that lasted years, and to pass difficult exams with a high fail rate, and one of the things they had to learn was the particuar language used in patent claims etc. I was not either a patent or trade mark attorney and was involved in the marketing/website side of the business, which involved a lot of writing, but not of any patent claims. The one thing I learned there that I benefit from in my life as a translator is that I would not touch translation of technical patent claims. (I have translated a couple of theory-based claims, which I took because of the lack of technical detail, but one still hads to be aware of the language used.) If you can learn the language required, by all means try, but Dan has laid out the issues you will be dealing with. ▲ Collapse
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