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Quality of a UPC translation

The transitional UPC period of at least 6 years (up to 2029) (extendable up to 12 years) is supposed to last until high quality computer-generated translations into all official languages of the EU are available. The translation to be filed during this period is legally for information only, but according to the preamble of the respective Council Regulation (EU) No 1260/2012, “translations should not be carried out by automated means and their high quality should contribute to the training of translation engines by the EPO”. Hence, downloading a computer-generated translation from “EPO Patent Translate” and filing it as UP translation would appear to be a misuse of the system. Neural networks (i.e. AI-generated translations) do not really improve by being trained with low-quality computer-generated translations. From my perspective, it can be seen as a general principle of our profession that any reduction of quality is a step backwards. Even though not legally binding, nobody can prevent a judge from being influenced by an incorrect ( computer-generated) translation in her/his mother language and a conflicting party can be expected to point to that.

On the other hand, the difference in costs of a fully manual human translation compared to a free computer-generated translation is significant, such that intermediate solutions are worth to consider. While computer-generated translation tools clearly do not reach the quality of professional human translators, they can well support them by providing preliminary translations in a quick and convenient way, which are then to be optimized by a human translator.

Such optimization is dearly needed: currently, most computer-generated translation software suffers from consistency issues. A well-known problem is that it may translate individual terms in a manner which does not fit to the specific technical field of a patent or which changes over different parts of the document. And when the human translator adapts the wording in one sentence, the limited context scope of the computer algorithm does not apply the adaptation to remote sentences, such that the next iteration of the same word may be translated differently. Glossaries, known from other computer-aided translation (CAT) tools, are barely combined with neural networks or limited in flexibility. In the end, it often requires numerous manual steps which reduce efficiency.

DIPS International uses computer-generated translations, optimized by a human translator. This allows us to keep our fees low and the quality high. In the last 10 years, we have not increased (and for some language combinations even decreased) our fees, despite an inflation rate of 27 % (Eurozone, between 2014 and 2024).

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