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Christopher Carr

Christopher Carr does stuff and writes about stuff.

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6 Responses

  1. BradK says:

    Oh, I was expecting a piece on Pink Floyd.Report

  2. Chad says:

    I work IT for an IP law firm and right now most everyone is just using Google Translate for foreign language documents anyways (or worse, they run the document through OCR and THEN through Google Translate!) My limited non-IP lawyer understanding is that generally, if you’re referring to a foreign patent document, then you’re really just looking for the gist of it to see if it bears any relation to whatever you’re working on for purposes of prior art. Nuance is rarely needed (and if it is then they have translators they ship the documents off to). So this doesn’t really surprise me.Report

    • kenB in reply to Chad says:

      Also worth mentioning that they’re not going to be using off-the-shelf Google Translate — it’ll be specially trained for this content.  Assuming that patents include a lot of boilerplate and customary language (and little room for personal style), it might even produce halfway-decent results.Report

  3. James Hanley says:

    Christopher, I’m not an expert, but I think international patent law has become pretty standardized, due to the WTO TRIPS  (Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement. In the absence of finding an expert quickly, you might find value in the WTO’s TRIPS page.Report

  4. BlaiseP says:

    Machine translation might work reasonably well in this context if its lexicon was compiled exclusively from legal or quasi-official documents, say UN translations.   James has already referred to TRIPS page.    Such a paradigm would exclude vernacular usages.

    The underlying problem is fairly obvious:   the lexicon of Law French is already resident in English and American law but the modern usages in both French and English are profoundly different.   The vocabulary of law is horribly intransigent in every country, refusing to evolve in the face of modernity.Report

  5. I would be happy to collaborate with you on thisReport