Report:PatBase/Viewing Results/Viewing Full Text/Machine Translations for Latin Text
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Machine Translations for Latin Text
PatBase offers a machine translation service via Google which will quickly translate English full-text passages into a number of non-English languages supported by the Google Translate service. Alternatively, the tool can be used on non-English records in a wide variety of languages, to create machine translations into English. However, records that exist in PatBase as non-Latin languages are translated via a different feature. A discussion of machine translation options for non-Latin text is introduced in the next section Machine Translations for Non-Latin Text.
Machine translation for Latin-text starting languages takes place from the full text review window. Before using the feature, searchers are required to tick a consent box which states that machine translations may contain errors, and are not intended to replace human translations. PatBase explicitly states that their machine translation is powered by Google.
Any keyword highlighting that was present in the full text record before translation will appear (for the correct word) in the machine translated text, making this feature an excellent tool for users to gather keyword translations in other languages. Users might then perform a full text search using those foreign-language keywords.
The screenshot below shows English-language patent text that has been machine-translated into simplified Chinese using PatBase's internal translation tool.
Editor's Note:The ability to identify the location of highlighted keywords is a boon to searchers wishing to conduct text searches in other languages. If the search requires a query in a specific language, but a native language searcher is not available/affordable, identifying keywords in other languages via a machine translator is one way to text search in an unfamiliar language. Note that this correlation of keywords is not available in the machine translation feature for non-Latin text in PatBase, discussed in the next section.
A notable feature of this machine translation tool is the consent box that users must tick before proceeding to execute the machine translation function. This extra emphasis on the negative aspects of machine translation may be due to the involvement of RWS, a partner in the development of PatBase. RWS is a worldwide translation provider, and thus would be well aware of the pitfalls of machine translated text.
