Patents & IP

Patent translation
where the claim is the point

The protection lives in the claims. Render one a shade wider or a shade narrower than the original and you have changed what the patent actually covers — so we treat claim language as the legal text it is, not as prose to improve.

  • Claims translated conservatively
  • One term, one rendering, every time
  • Descriptions, abstracts and prior art
  • Trademark and IP dispute documents
  • Revised in full by a second linguist
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Send the specification, the claim set or whatever you have. You get a fixed price and a deadline you agree to before anything starts.

Your documents

    What we guarantee
    • Every line revised by a second linguist
    • Get a quote the same day
    • Confidential — NDA on request

    The claim is the product

    A patent protects what its claims say it protects. Nothing wider, nothing narrower. So when a claim crosses into another language, the translator is not describing the invention — they are drawing the boundary again. A word chosen a little broader than the source claims ground the inventor never had. A word chosen a little narrower gives ground away. Both are legal problems, and neither of them looks like a mistake on the page.

    Conservative, and consistent

    We keep claim language close to the source and then we keep it fixed. One term gets one rendering — in every claim, in the description that supports it, and in every member of the family that has to read as the same invention. Where the source is deliberately broad or deliberately vague, the translation stays that way. Tidying it up is not our call to make.

    Terminology comes from the file

    The right word has usually been decided already: by the description, by earlier filings in the same family, by the prior art cited in the file. We work from those before we work from a dictionary. When the source contradicts itself — and long specifications do — we ask rather than quietly pick the reading we prefer.

    Not every document in a portfolio needs the same treatment. A specification going on file, a licence agreement and a competitor’s patent you need to read before deciding what to do about it are different jobs, priced and handled differently. Tell us which one this is.

    Patent and IP documents we translate

    If yours is not listed, send it anyway — the list is what we see most, not a limit.

    What we do, and what we don’t

    Plainly, so nobody has to guess: we translate the documents. We are not patent attorneys. We do not file anything on your behalf, we do not prosecute applications, and we do not tell you whether something is patentable or whether anyone is infringing it. Those are your attorney’s calls, and they are the reason you have one.

    What we bring instead is a translator who can actually read the technology — a mechanism, a chemical process, a medical device — plus a second linguist who checks every line against the source, and terminology that stays put: across the claims, across the family, and across the years it takes a patent to mature. Send us your firm’s glossary and we follow it, including the choices we would have made differently. Don’t have one, and we will build it as we go and hand it to you.

    And if something arrives that we cannot do justice to — a field where we do not have the right translator — you will hear that before you commit, not afterwards.

    Happy to be of service,

    Founder

    Frequently asked questions

    Tap any question to see the answer!
    Will my claims be translated literally?
    Close to it, yes. We stay near the source wording and resist improving it, because a claim that reads better in the target language is often a claim that covers something different. Where the source is genuinely ambiguous we flag it and ask, rather than deciding the scope for you.
    We have the same invention on file in several countries. Can you keep the wording consistent?
    That is the main thing we are for. One term gets one rendering across the whole family, held in a terminology database that survives between jobs — so what you file in year four still matches what you filed in year one.
    Do you translate the description and abstract as well as the claims?
    Yes, and we would rather do them together than months apart. The description is what the claims are read against; when the two are translated by different people at different times they drift, and that drift is visible to anyone looking for it.
    Can you work to our attorney’s glossary?
    Send it and we follow it exactly. If you do not have one, we build a termbase as we work and hand it over at the end — it is yours, whatever you do with it next.
    Do you handle trademark work too?
    Yes — registry documents, specifications of goods and services, oppositions and the correspondence around them. Same rule as patents: the terms stay fixed across the whole file.
    Do you use machine translation on patents?
    Not on claims. Machine output reads fluently and shifts scope quietly, which is the one failure this material cannot absorb. For bulk prior art you only need to understand, a machine draft revised by a qualified human is often the sensible choice — and we will say so rather than sell you a full translation you do not need.
    Our application is not published yet. Is it safe with you?
    Only the translator and the reviser see it, both under confidentiality agreements with us, and we sign your NDA on request. We never reuse the content of your documents for anything else.
    How much does it cost?
    It depends on the document and the language pair, so we quote each one individually. Send us the file and you will have a fixed price the same day — with no obligation.