South Korea is the world’s leader in patent applications per GDP; they have surpassed powerhouses such as Japan and the United States. With the increased demand in patent translation services in Korea, language experts are beginning to discover distinct variations in Korean patents that usually don’t apply to patents processed in other countries.
Korean Patents | Grammar Causes Confusion
Differences between Korean and English grammar can affect the arrangement of sections in a patent. Steve Bammel, an industry expert in Korean business and language, recently explained to Language Connections about one issue typically encountered by English speakers,
“A common phrase at the beginning of the claims section in an English language patent begins with ‘What is claimed is’, but in a Korean patent, this phrase is found at the end of the claims and frequently results in questions from clients who want to know why it’s missing.” So don’t be too alarmed the next time your translated document appears to be reorganized.
A professional translator must be able to translate back and forth accurately between both languages. But significant differences in sentence and word structure between Korean and English can make this all the more challenging. For instance, in Korean there are: 1) No articles; 2) A Subject-Object-Verb sentence word order; 3) Verbs are not conjugated to correspond to the subject, and; 4) Verb endings as well as nouns, adjectives and pronouns are defined by honorifics.
Korean Patents | Regulations Are Changing
The Korean Patents Act passed in 2015, allows patents to be submitted in English, in addition to Korean. Although English is acceptable, a Korean translation must be submitted within 14 months from the earliest priority date. The newly passed act also loosens requirements for amending Korean applications filed in a foreign language. Before 2015, an error in translation in a document could not be corrected, which put immense pressure on the translators to get the translation correct the first time. As of now, an applicant is allowed to correct a translation error before the patent enters the national phase.
Is Machine Translation Effective
T
he Korean Patent Office (KIPO) offers a fee based Korean to English Patent Translation service called K2E-PAT. The service is a real time automatic English translation service for Korean patent information. The KIPO, does however, recommend using a translation vendor for a thorough translation from Korean to English or vice versa. The machine service can be useful while doing preliminary research on a patent, but it is not as effective as a human translator.
Naturally Korean patent attorneys prefer reading patent documents translated into Korean over English in spite of the fact that they may have good linguistic competency in English. Recent efforts to improve the existing machine translation systems have resulted in customized systems compiling large scale bilingual patent terminology and translation databases which follow translation patterns based on algorithms. However, these will not eliminate the need for human expertise. If machine translation is used, it is best reviewed by a human translator.
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