Applied Testing of HICATS/JE for Japanese Patent Abstracts

[Machine Translation Summit, September 17-19, 1987, Hakone Prince Hotel, Japan] APPLIED TESTING OF HICATS/JE FOR JAPANESE PATENT ABSTRACTS Tadaaki Oshio Japan Patent Information Organization 1. Introduction Japio (Japan Patent Information Organization) was established as a juridical person on August 1, 1985, with the permission of the Japanese Patent Office, Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Japio is an information organization offering retrieval services of Patents, Utility Models, Designs and Trademarks. Upon request from the Japanese Patent Office, Japio translates Japanese Abstracts of Published Unexamined Patent Applications (Official Gazette) into English. The problems that have arisen in connection with performing this translation task are outlined below, and it is our aim to overcome these problems by adopting machine translation. (1) It is extremely difficult to guarantee that the supply of translators with the expert technical knowledge is equal to the demand for translation according to budgets and the following problems have resulted due to the imbalance in numbers of translators and volume of works. (A) Each year more than 20% of the Japanese Abstracts remain untranslated into English. (B) Due to the overall year-on-year increase in the volume of Published Patent Applications it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of translation of experts into English (an increase of about 30,000 documents per year). (C) It is difficult to satisfy the new demand for English translation of the Japanese Abstracts of Published Utility Model Applications. (2) It is necessary to shorten the period of translating Japanese Abstracts into English to demand for fastness of patent information. 2. The characteristics of Japanese Abstracts from the view point of machine translation (1) The following characteristics are noticeable when a lot of information will be included in a Japanese Abstract that is limited to 350 characters. (A) Logical subjects and objects of the sentences are often left out. (B) Auxiliaries and verbs are often left out. (C) One sentence becomes longer (average 75 characters) making it ambiguous and very difficult to handle. - 87 — (2) There are many technical words used in patent documents especially. In order to perform a more precise machine translation of the Japanese Abstracts mentioned in (1), it is necessary to carry out pre-editing of the original script by reintroducing the parts of the text and by eliminating the ambiguities to obtain Japanese sentences be fit for machine translation. And in order to overcome the problems posed in (2), it is necessary to provide a suitable technical dictionary for patent documents. 3. Operation of the machine translation system (1) Present making process of Patent Abstracts in English (A) Patent Abstracts in Japanese are translated by translators into English. (about 15 days) (B) Abstracts in English are input in the file after revision. (about 20 days) (C) Abstracts in English input in the file are proofread. (about 10 days) (2) Automation of the translation process into English The operating method listed below are being examined in order to rationalize the translation process in the light of the …

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