Fall 2018 Meeting Report
The fall meeting of the Ohio Honyaku Group was held on Saturday, October 27, 2018, at JASCO (Japan America Society of Central Ohio) headquarters in Dublin, Ohio. A total of 10 members attended.
The meeting started with a brief explanation of upcoming JASCO events by executive director Ben Pachter. On November 8, JASCO will host an economic business seminar entitled “Future of the Workforce” in coordination with the Columbus 2020 campaign for attracting business investment. He mentioned that other bilingual initiatives are also on the horizon. Details and registration information for this and other events are available from the JASCO website.
Instead of the usual format with 5-minute presentations by members, this meeting used a new format with a single presentation. However, as older members of Ohio Honyaku recall, this was actually the original format of Ohio Honyaku meetings at its inception, and in this sense, Ohio Honyaku simply reverted back to its original meeting format.
This seminar-style meeting covered patent translation, and it was broken into two sessions. The first session provided a brief introduction to patents for members, some of whom had never even viewed a patent before. The second session, led by a member who currently translates patents, was a roundtable session where members discussed translation of a patent text that was provided to members beforehand.
The introductory presentation, entitled “A Brief Introduction to Patents,” explained patents and intellectual property, their history, historical moments in patent law, differences between Japanese and U.S. patent formats, the filing process, requirements for patents, priority dates, patentable subject matter, and who can obtain patents. (In the US, only the inventor can obtain a patent, but in other countries, the applicant (e.g., inventor, inventor’s employer, etc.) becomes the patent grantee.)
The presenter also covered terminology and meanings unique to patents, the requirements for specifications, the sections of a patent application, differences between translating for information and for filing, what can and cannot be patented, and types of drawings.
He also explained the Great Selden-Ford Patent Dispute to illustrate the importance of the scope of claims and how they are worded. Finally, a short list was provided of suggested translations into English of main Japanese patent sections.
The workgroup session covered an abstract of an actual Japanese patent. Members talked about their proposed translations, and the presenter gave his feedback and reasons for choosing certain terminology and writing styles. The presenter talked about important distinctions in patent terminology, such as the difference between “comprising of” (open list) and “consisting of” (closed list), techniques used for handling long sentences and relative clauses (look for particles and parallelisms), use of indefinite articles (first time) and definite articles (second time and after), avoiding use of conditional statements, and exceptions to these cases. He also cited the WIPO terminology database as a valuable resource for confirming terminology.
Because discussion on the practice translation was still not completed at meeting end, some members expressed interest in continuing this topic at the next meeting.
The Ohio Honyaku Group meets quarterly to discuss issues of importance to translators and interpreters of Japanese, and we welcome all current and future Japanese language professionals. The meetings are lightly structured and new topics for discussion tend to arise spontaneously as we chat. If you live in Ohio or a nearby state, or if you happen to be visiting the area when we are meeting, please join us!
The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 19, 2019 at JASCO headquarters.
For more information, please visit our website at http://www.ohiohonyaku.com/.
Contact us at inquiries@ohiohonyaku.com.
Report prepared by C. K.
