We’ve blogged about professional translation and engineering translation and technical translation services for the oil and gas industry and for the aircraft industry. When dealing with an international chemical or pharmaceutical patent case, one will often come across the use of chemical compound names as they are the primary way of conveying molecular structures between chemists and researchers. In other words, understanding the chemical nomenclature is key to understanding the patent. Unlike other words, generally the use of a compound name is universal. And although a vast majority of the profession uses English, a company will often use its employees’ native language when writing a chemical compound name.
Although there are many software-based programs for providing foreign language translations of chemical compound names, they come with many problems. For instance, foreign language translation software programs often fail to recognize the slight differences in characters and symbols used to represent the compound name in a particular language. For this reason, it is essential to hire a foreign language translation service that provides human translation services, is knowledgeable about chemistry and is able to understand not only the foreign language names but, more importantly, the foreign language symbols associated with these chemical names.