A Practice Report On C-E Patent Specification Abstract Translation

On April 17 th,2019,recommended by my supervisor,I participated in the ChineseEnglish translation project of patent specification abstracts provided by the Intellectual Property Publishing House.By the end of September 2019,the accumulated words of the original texts have reached 50000.Taking the translations of this project as examples,this report discusses the language features of the patent specification abstract,the role of the patent abstract in the international patent application,the key points and difficulties in the translation process,as well as the translation methods and experience summed up in the course of the project.The project involves the fields of machinery,transportation,chemistry and medicine.During the translation process,translation tools such as search engines,online terminology databases and machine translation tools are used.This report consists of four chapters: task description,process description,case analysis and conclusion.Chapter 1 is the task description,which introduces the background of the project,the language features of patent and patent abstract,and the task requirements of the project.Chapter 2 is the process description,which introduces the pre-translation preparations,the project process and the review work of the project.Chapter 3 is the case analysis,which includes three levels: the lexical level,the syntactic level and the textual level.At the lexical level,it discusses the solutions to problems such as neologism,polysemy,and ambiguity: comprehensively using machine translation tools and online terminology databases to translate neologisms,re-constructing word phrases or short sentences containing non-standard expressions before translating,and tracing the source of ambiguous terms to eliminate the ambiguity and select the proper translation.At the syntactic level,it analyzes how to translate long Chinese sentences and phrases with complex structures into concise and accurate English and keep a balance between accuracy and efficiency.Then the report analyzes how to integrate short sentences with loose structure into a compact and clear English sentence to make the abstract more concise and accurate,so as to make it more in line with international norms,providing a guarantee for the international application of the patent.At the textual level,it analyzes how to ensure the consistency of terms and the inner logic of the whole text.Chapter 4 is the conclusion,which concludes the reflections from the process of translation and the communication with the reviewers,and puts forward some methods and strategies to improve the efficiency and quality of patent abstract translation.Based on the translation practice,this report discusses the difficulties and solutions in the translation of patent specification abstracts,in order to provide references for future patent translators and researchers in the field of patent translation.