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By Mery Molenaar, S&TD Administrator

The moral of this story is the frequently repeated advice that it takes more than being bilingual to be a translator, and that it takes substantial professional experience to pass the certification exam.

That’s the middle of the story; I regard it as the start of my third career.

You mentioned that your journey into translation marked the start of your third career. I’d love to hear more about the first two. What led you from working in physics to becoming a professional translator?

I would describe my first career as being academic. I went through an undergraduate degree in physics (with lots of courses in math and astronomy) at Cornell University, followed by two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching physics in French. I earned a PhD in astronomy at Harvard University only to find as a postdoc that the job market for professors of astronomy was very limited. After a long wait as the first runner-up for a physics professorship at Swarthmore College (their first choice got two extensions on the deadline before accepting their offer), I changed direction (and career) and took a position in industrial R&D with Bell Labs. That was the start of my second career.

Around 2000, the telecom industry shifted from a boom cycle to a bust cycle. I saw it coming and tried to get out of the way, but didn’t get far enough; the company I jumped to went bankrupt and I was laid off. I tried to get back into teaching at college or high school, but couldn’t find a viable, sustainable path. And that’s when I switched to translating.

That is quite the journey. Once you made the shift to translation, what were some of the advantages and challenges of translating scientific texts from French to English?

With that background, focusing on scientific and technical texts was an obvious choice. The background also made it easy to find and skim source material in both French and English to find the terminology I needed. That is an advantage. It is especially an advantage with patents since they must refer to the closest published work related to the subject that is publicly available. That means the patents often have useful pointers to sources for researching terminology. A more doubtful advantage is understanding what the author means to say from the subject matter. This can be a crutch: substituting understanding of what is actually written in the source language with knowledge of the subject matter. It’s an important aspect of professional development to get rid of that crutch.

Someone coming into translating scientific and technical documents—without a background in science and technology, but with a better understanding of French—would not need that crutch. But they would not have an understanding of the style and vocabulary for writing scientific and technical documents in their target language.

How did you begin to specialize in patent translation and what unique challenges does patent translation present?

I understand patents as being a specific genre of technical writing. Yes, there is a lot of legal discussion that goes on around patents. International treaties and national laws govern a lot of the structure of patents and what has to be included in writing patents. Reading a few patents filed by people whom I had worked with was enough to get a grasp of patentese in English. The rest is a matter of writing about the scientific or technical subject.

One of the requirements in patent law is that all the parts need to be described, as well as all the connections between the parts. The text of the patent thus involves intricate descriptions of parts with complicated shapes and complicated spatial relationships. Here, the crutch is reading the mechanical drawings in the figures. The challenge is learning the vocabulary (in both languages) for describing the shapes and positions.

Can you share an example of a particularly tricky or interesting patent you’ve worked on?

I particularly remember the description in a patent for a component of a watch laser cut from a thin sheet of metal. The only part that wasn’t part of the original sheet of metal was a small screw that was used to adjust the frequency of a mechanical oscillator that served to replace the mainspring.

I also remember translating a series of hair coloring patents filed by L’Oréal; Procter & Gamble wanted them translated for information. There is some excellent small molecule organic chemistry going on in the dye, and protein biochemistry in the hair. As a result of that, I tried hard to market my translation services to the intellectual property department within L’Oréal, and to the patent agent and patent law firm that had filed the patent in France. I never heard a word from them. Later, I did manage to talk to a patent attorney working in-house for L’Oréal in the US. They explained that patents for filing in the US always came to them from Paris already translated and there was a limited list of US patent law firms they were allowed to work with.

You are also a registered patent agent. Why and how did you decide to become a registered agent?

At some point I got the idea that if I understood patent law better, I could translate patents better. In hindsight, that probably isn’t true. Studying US patent law and then limited parts of French patent law and the European Patent Convention did help a great deal with translating filings and decisions related to patent infringement in France, and patent opposition and appeals in the European Patent Office.

Once I started studying patent law, I kept going. I figured out that I met the requirements for taking the US patent office registration exam. This is currently the only bar exam in the US for which one does not need to have a law degree. One does, however, need to have an undergraduate degree in a patentable subject matter. My degree in physics satisfied that requirement. After a great deal of self-study, I passed the exam on the second try and became a Registered Patent Agent in 2010.

In matters before the patent office, a patent agent and a patent attorney have met the same requirements and can both do the same things as legal representatives of their client. The attorney has additionally been admitted to a state bar and can oversee patent infringement lawsuits in federal court. Unfortunately, with a limited exception as an expert witness concerning a poorly translated patent, I have never actually worked as a patent agent.

Did you at any point during your career as a translator think about going back to research?

Actually, I did. In 2013, I attended a reunion of doctoral graduates of the Harvard astronomy department. About 3% of the graduates of the department, at that time, had gone on to receive Nobel Prizes, so I was excited to increase the number of Nobel prize winners I had met, and posthumously pull ahead of my father’s tally. I left wondering if I could find a way to reconnect with where I had been before in my first career.

As a graduate student, I spent a few hours looking at Henri Poincaré’s book Nouvelles méthodes de la mécanique céleste. The book spanned three thick volumes, and I found both the French and the math intimidating. The work I was doing for my thesis involved specific dynamical systems. Further, I had a friend who was an assistant professor of mathematics who was nudging me to connect with a colleague in the math department who was studying the mathematics of dynamical systems. I resisted the nudging, but was close to a field that Poincaré had established.

What drew you to Henri Poincaré’s work?

Henri Poincaré was an amazing French mathematician who was active from about 1882 until his death in 1911. He was also active in physics, astronomy, philosophy of science and popularization of science. As an undergraduate, I had heard of some of his work in a field of mathematical physics called dynamical systems. In physics, a dynamical system is a system whose properties at one moment are determined from the properties at a previous moment by a system of time-dependent differential equations. The motion of planets and asteroids around the Sun, and satellites like the Moon around the Earth are an example of a dynamical system. The Sun, Moon and Earth moving under their mutual gravitational attraction are a specific example of a dynamical system called the three-body problem.

In 2013 I went back to look and found that there was a translation done in the 1970s that had a bad reputation for poor quality. I also found that Poincaré had an earlier book introducing the same subject with a more approachable length: Le problème des trois corps et les équations de dynamique. It was published as a single volume in 1890 and much of the material in New Methods of Celestial Mechanics, published later in the same decade, was an expansion on the earlier book, The Three-Body Problem and the Equations of Dynamics. The tables of contents even lined up. The three-body problem in the title is a reference to the Sun, Earth and Moon, or the Sun, Jupiter and the asteroid Hecuba that Poincaré studied in the following decade. The “equations of dynamics” refer to the time-dependent differential equations governing a dynamical system.

I decided I wanted to understand what Poincaré had done in his 1890 book and that translating it was a good approach for me at that time. One reality of freelance translating is that there are cycles of feast and famine. During the famines, when paid work dried up, I translated and studied Poincaré. After three years and almost 60,000 words, I had a complete translation that I had edited and polished. I also had the idea that it was worth publishing. I got some good advice from a former professor and found my way directly to an editor who was very interested. This book has now been cited 82 times. I take this as a sign that I picked an important book with an unmet need for a translation into English and that I provided a translation that people found readable.

In 2017, you won the S. Edmund Berger Prize for Excellence in Scientific and Technical Translation. Can you tell us more about the project that earned you this recognition?

The book, The Three-Body Problem and the Equations of Dynamics, my translation, came out in the spring of 2017. That year, ST&D member Matthew Schlecht nominated me based on this book for the Berger Prize. I received the prize at the ATA Conference in Washington, DC, in 2017. In part, I sold my publisher on the proposition that I had prepared a much better translation than the earlier translation of the related three-volume book. The Berger prize was a validation that I had done a good translation, and when my publisher tweeted an announcement that I had won the prize, I got a big thrill out of that! When the ATA sent out the press release announcing the prize, it was picked up in the biweekly highlights newsletter sent to members of the American Astronomical Society. (I should note that their press officer then was a graduate school classmate and friend.) That too was a thrill.

Congratulations, Bruce! I can imagine how rewarding that was for you. Have you written any other books since then?

Yes, one suggestion led to a second book that was half a translation of articles by Poincaré about the theory of electrons that anticipated large parts (but not some of the key core concepts) of Einstein’s theory of special relativity, Henri Poincaré: Electrons to Special Relativity: Translation of Selected Papers and Discussion. The other half was original writing in history of science concerning the discovery of the electron and topics related to Poincaré’s work. The book itself or chapters from it have been cited 8 times.

Now I am working on a third book (under contract with the same publisher) about the first Solvay Conference in Physics held in 1911. In this book, I am taking a broad view of the participants, their friendships, and the background of the issues in physics. I’m currently about a quarter of the way through writing.

Coming back to Poincaré, what was the most surprising thing you discovered while researching his work?

As part of my background preparation before writing the book about the Solvay Conference, I read two articles written by Poincaré very quickly after the conference. They showed that he had a very sophisticated understanding of statistical mechanics. I found this surprising because in books about Poincaré I had read, there is no mention of his interest in this topic. Looking through Poincaré’s publication list, I found that he had written important papers on the topic reflecting an interest in how to understand entropy and making connections between statistical mechanics and many-body problems in dynamical systems.

This digression lasted about two years and led to the preparation and submission of four manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals. As a physicist, writing history of physics more for physicists than historians, the manuscripts are in a difficult middle ground.

The first article, Early Application of Kinetic Theory of Gases to Star Clusters (published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy), concerns the work by others that followed a suggestion by Poincaré of applying thermodynamic or statistical principles to globular clusters. It has been cited once.

After this first article, you went on to write a few more, the most recent one in December 2024. Can you tell us a little more about these?

Absolutely. A second article, A Flame War about Entropy, has been accepted by the American Journal of Physics and will appear in the June 2025 issue (or maybe a month earlier or later). This article takes a more lighthearted look at a large series of letters to the editor in the British engineering trade press. Entropy is hard to understand. Several prominent physicists, Oliver Lodge, Max Planck and Poincaré, contributed columns to the trade press to try to settle the issue; they had very different perspectives.

I recently submitted a third article to another journal. This manuscript, Poincaré on Gibbs and on Probability in Statistical Mechanics, considers Poincaré’s positive opinion of J Willard Gibbs’s book, Elements of Statistical Mechanics, and a clarification that Poincaré added about the origin and meaning of probability in statistical mechanics. It is currently with peer reviewers. It should be noted that while Gibbs and Poincaré were contemporaries, their approaches to preparing and writing technical material were quite different, and writing on technical subjects by both of them is considered very difficult to understand.

I released a fourth article, Contemporary Reaction to Gibbs’s Statistical Mechanics, to arXiv, a preprint repository in January, because I was having trouble finding a peer-reviewed history of science journal that would consider a manuscript that read like it was written for physicists. I have recently tried resubmitting it to a peer-reviewed journal in statistical physics that publishes some articles related to physics history.

You have had a varied and impressive career. Before we wrap up, I want to touch base on one more topic: machine translation and AI. This is playing a significant role in translation nowadays. How has this impacted your work?

It definitely has. I don’t get paid anything for the journal articles and I have probably earned less than $3000 in author royalties for the two books. I am therefore still dependent on revenue from translation.

Currently, I am getting a very reduced volume of work for translation, and it is mostly patents being translated for filing—these need a human translation and a human to sign a statement of accuracy—and some filings with the European Patent Office Opposition Division. Unfortunately, I no longer see the diversity of subjects I did 10 or 15 years ago. It has been a long time since I’ve been asked to translate a handwritten document; in the past, I occasionally translated pages from laboratory notebooks and medical records. In addition, I often see people offering per word rates that are half of what I was paid in 2003.

Yes, that is a tough reality. It’s clear that the landscape of translation has changed significantly, and it hasn’t been easy for many professionals. Sometimes industries evolve in ways that aren’t fair to those with deep expertise.

Bruce, I really appreciate your taking the time to share your journey, both the rewarding moments and the challenges. Your expertise and the work you’ve done have made an impact, and that deserves to be recognized.