A Report On The Translation Of Patentability Reports Based On Newmark’s Text Typology Theory Exemplified By The C-E Translation Of The Wosa In The Field Of Communications

The Written Opinion of the International Searching Authority(ISA)(WOSA) is a written opinion on the patentability of a claimed invention that is prepared by the ISA of a state under the Patent Cooperation Treaty(PCT) as the World Intellectual Property Organization(WIPO) required, and is required to be translated into English. Moreover, as international patent applications and WOSA files in the communications industry increased in China, the quality of the C-E translation of the WOSA means a lot to whether Chinese patent applicants can get an international patent successfully.Based on the author’s intern patent translation practices in Beijing RWS Science & Technology Information Consultancy Co., Ltd., this report introduces the source, features, procedures and requirements of the C-E translation of the WOSA in the field of communications. Moreover, under the guidance of Newmark’s text typology theory, the report concludes that a WOSA text is a type of text with informative and vocative functions mixed together, and contains textual features of legal and technical texts.The report points out that in the C-E translation of the WOSA, the author was mainly confronted with the following difficulties: 1) translating articles, singular and plural forms, terminologies and examiners’ verbal errors at the lexical level; and 2) translating incomplete sentences, sentences with no subjects and long sentences at the syntactic level. Accordingly, based on practical translation cases and the features and functions of a WOSA text in the field of communications, the report concludes some translation methods by adopting the semantic and communicative translation strategies based on Newmark’s text typology theory: 1) using the word-for-word translation method for terminologies and making reasonable modifications to obvious errors of examiners at the lexical level; and 2) using the context based translation method for incomplete sentences, using gerund and passive forms for sentences with no subjects, and splitting and reorganizing information of long sentences at the syntactic level.