The European Patent Office (EPO) launched yesterday the “Patent Translate”, a new machine translation service that uses Google’s technology. This is a good choice to save patent translation cost.
Currently, this tool allows translations from and to English for French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish. According to the EPO, in two years this service is expected to cover all the languages of the EPO member states, in addition to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian.
The service is available on Espacenet, the European publication server and via Google Translate.
So how to save patent translation cost?
Patent translation & filing costs are generally very high because of the complexity and the time it takes to complete. They are two of the most crucial processes when it comes to earning a patent for an invention. The filing of an application requires a lot of technical knowledge, patience, and subject-specific skills. Hence, because of its complexity, you should invest plenty of time to frame it in the right technical way. The only thing which we could possibly work upon to change is its cost. Here we will focus on the various ways on how to minimize patent translation & filing costs.
Use of Prominent Languages for Translation
The language which a lot of people from different nationalities can communicate and understand is English. This means that you should first draft a patent in the English language. You can use this patent application in different countries where the patent office accepts English as an official language for patent applications. This would definitely save a lot of money. This method focuses on not having to use translation services and hence, saving a significant amount of money.
Another savings method is using one prominent language for translation where one translation will cover multiple countries. Consider, if you choose Arabic as the translation language, you can file the same patent application in the different Gulf States. These countries include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. Similarly, using Latin American Spanish as translation language could help you cover almost all the countries in South America.
Use Translations from existing patent applications
Another method to save the cost is to have knowledge about pre-existing similar patent applications. This will help in framing the current application since you can take most of the language from the previous patent. This will help you in cutting costs because you won’t have to translate the application from scratch.
For example, consider want to file a patent in Russian language and there happens to be another similar application. Then, it will be easier to use the existing work, to create the new application by using repetitive text analysis. However, you must be careful and only use the translations and not the actual substance of the application. This could lead to that application acting as prior art and you might have trouble in dealing with it.
Perform market survey
Another way is to perform a market survey about the cost quotes from various translation vendors. This is done to get an idea about the rates, and then comparing the rates with the actual invoices. This would help you to determine how much can you invest in patent translation & filing costs. It will also make you aware of the cost savings that you can do.
Involve translation experts
One must consider consulting a professional translation expert to avoid unnecessary time delays and money losses. A good expert most likely knows everything about framing an application and making claims, etc. It’ll be helpful if the expert is of the same nationality as the place where you want to file the application. This will facilitate a much better and smoother translation.
