Patent Translation

Patent translation services can be found online or offline. Patent law firms often need English patent translations for the purposes of litigation aimed at preventing an infringement of patent rights. In an effort to keep their costs down, sometimes these firms will request patent translation services that "only the claims" of a patent be translated.

The claims of a patent are usually the most complicated part in patent translation job. To say that patent translation is difficult is quite an understatement. Patent translation is complicated especially when it comes to translating patent claims. This is so because some claims are written in a language that makes sense during the first reading, but gets difficult to understand as you read along. Another difficulty in patent translation is sometimes only the claims portion of a patent is faxed to a translator with no context or figures to help him or her understand their meaning. The job of those patent translation services is further made complicated because the language of the claims is sometime deliberately ambiguous in order to formulate a broad claim, even if the patent may typically provide only a relatively small and incremental improvement. Moreover, the legibility of a second or even third generation fax is often poor. This presents enormous problems in patent translation particularly when it is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty which characters are used in the Japanese text. 

Patent translation is truly demanding job. Those into patent translation sometimes get the blame if they fail to produce a patent translation that is less than perfect, regardless of the difficult conditions under which we they work. Patent translation is indeed a thankless job.

On the other hand, it is understandable that clients of patent law firms, who are ultimately footing the bill, would not want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the patent translation of entire patents that may or may not be relevant to a particular patented design. Despite this, it is still difficult, or impossible, to translate a cryptic section of text without any context. Fortunately, those working in patent translation services can find means to find the context on their own without any help from the clients.

The complete text of most published unexamined and examined Japanese patents (Kokai and Kokoku) can be downloaded or printed for free from the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) Website (www.jpo.go.jp) or from the European Patent Office (EPO) Website (www.ep.espacenet.com). The search page of the EPO site makes patents and utility models published in English, Japanese, German, and French in Adobe PDF format available to anyone.