A Report On The E-C Translation Of Patent Application Document Under The Skopos Theory

According to China’s State Intellectual Property Office,more and more foreign applicants apply for patents in China or file PCT international applications through China’s State Intellectual Property Office in recent years,stimulating the demand for patent translation because many applications are written in English.The patent application document should be translated so that readers can quickly and accurately grasp the technical information contained in it,define the scope of protection,and also eliminate the possibility that potential infringers propose a request for invalidation or evade tort liability.Based on relevant translation practice,this report analyzes the purpose of the translation of patent application document,and proposes solutions to typical problems in translation under the skopos theory.The patent application document has three parts: abstract,description and claims.As for the purpose of the translation,the abstract should briefly introduce the technical information,facilitating the retrieval of patent information;the description should describe the technical information clearly and accurately so that skilled persons in the art can understand and carry out the technical solution;the claims should determine clearly the scope of patent protection as largely as possible.Thus,various translation techniques are adopted in light of the distinct purposes of the translation of each part,so as to solve different problems in translation:(1)on lexical level,the translator can avoid mistranslation of technical terms and polysemous words through diction complying with the technical field and drawings;(2)on syntactic level,translation techniques like division of sentence and conversion are used to clarify the logical relation of the sentence and select appropriate syntactic structure;(3)on discourse level,addition of words and recasting of sentences allow appropriate cohesion and semantic coherence of the translation.As such,the quality of translation is improved to assist applicants in obtaining the patent right they deserve.