German–Spanish Patent and Technical Translation
Human precision where meaning matters
I am Kurt Wischin, founder of Ludwigs Leiter Translations. For more than 25 years, I have been providing translations from German and English into Spanish, working mainly for Mexican patent and intellectual property attorneys handling matters for clients in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, other European countries, the United States and Canada.
The core activity of Ludwigs Leiter Translations has been intellectual property translation, including patent specifications, claims, legal-technical correspondence, and related documentation. This work is informed by many years of firsthand experience with technical innovation and marketing in the metalworking industry, as well as by the translation of complex and abstract texts, including philosophical and humanities papers by world-renowned authors, published in high-impact open-access journals, primarily from English or German into Spanish.
What we offer
- Patent specifications, claims, and descriptions (German and English → Spanish)
- Related legal-technical documents and correspondence
- Terminology review and consistency checks
- Urgent and occasional translation projects (including Spanish → English and German)
- Translations of papers, essays, academic texts and books in philosophy and the humanities
- Strict confidentiality for all materials
Why human translation still matters
Machine translation has improved dramatically in recent years. Algorithms can produce sentences that appear correct — but language is not ruled by syntax or code; it is governed by understanding a situation, a purpose, a technical idea. Understanding depends on social interaction among real people; for example, Michael Tomasello, an American developmental psychologist, vividly describes how very young children acquire language through a native understanding of the intentions of adults surrounding them, in theoretical ideas inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy, which convincingly rejects the notion that human language could be explained by syntax and neuroscience alone. While people naturally connect their discourse with the situation in which it is used, machines must rely on formal rules. Language, however, is not a logically coherent system of audible or visual signs but part of a shared human praxis. Without the understanding that only a shared form of life provides, a translation based merely on rules of syntax and electronic dictionaries may sound fluent yet distort the original thought, whether the task is to convey an industrial innovation precisely or to grasp complex ideas independently of their original linguistic form, as may be easily shown by comparing some machine translations with the original text, even when they are produced by the most potent systems relying on Artificial Intelligence currently available. In texts related to matters of Intellectual Property, where a single term can define legal protection, such distortions can have serious consequences. That is why I translate every document personally, with the same care, precision, and conceptual clarity that also guide my work in the philosophy of language.
Background
- 14 years as general manager of the Mexican branch of a German machinery & auto-parts manufacturer.
- 25 years as a freelance translator (DE/EN → ES), mainly in intellectual property.
- PhD in philosophy of language and logic, with additional management training.
- Editorial work and published translations in philosophy.
Based in Mexico, working with clients across Europe and the Americas.