The approach presented here enables Japanese users with no knowledge of English or legal English to generate patent claims in English from a Japanese-only interface. It exploits the highly determined structure of patent claims and merges Natural Language Generation (NLG) and Machine Translation (MT) techniques and resources as realized in the AutoPat and PC-Transfer applications. Due to its tuned MT engine, the approach can be seen as a human-aided machine translation (HAMT) system circumventing major obstacles in full-scale Japanese-English MT. The approach is fully implemented on a large scale and will be commercially released in autumn 2005.

Modality is an important, but complex linguistic phenomenon that concerns all levels of language production. NLP research has rather refrained from this subject, but we show that many errors in machine translation systems are directly related to the absence of a proper interlingual treatment of modality. We outline the traces of such a modal interlingua by presenting the “Module of Modality”, parts of which are currently being implemented in a Japanese-English system.