Translation Issues In European Patents

Living in a world of modernization, helping to protect intellectual property continues to be one of the common and in demand type of translations in the market. Hitting the global market, it is important that you will protect your inventions and intellectual property; otherwise, the foreign country can have the benefit, by selling it to other inventors or other countries. And of course, for the sake of your money, time spent for the invention and your personal sanity, it is important to get at least some return on your investment.Translating patents can be risky, it involves plenty of technical thinking and thus the translation should be accurate and should be intelligible, especially to lay readers. However, it is true that there is no such thing as perfect translation, although the latter has been claimed by all translators and translation companies, but the truth is that every language is unique, and multiple variants of the same translation can be equally valid and ‘perfect’. And thus, only a professional, skilled and well-experienced translator can actually deliver an accurate patent or other technical translation.Filing a patent is not simple either, partly because of the situation or rules regarding European patents, it can be a time consuming process, and it can expensive. However recently, Europe Union authorities agreed to have a single form of patent and assigned a common or centralized court to dealing with patent issues and services. As soon as this official single European patent will be effective, the European Union, companies and the inventors can benefit and will have easier procedures in filing patents.But what is wrong with the current European patent system? European Union officials found out that the current European patent system costs a serious amount of money. It has been estimated that the current European patent system costs 11 times as much as the United States does. Usually, filing a patent is expensive due to translation processes. The common scenario is that, the companies or the inventors would file a patent in the Munich office, which is officially affiliated with the EU. So what happens now is that, the inventor or the company would actually spend money for the patent translation that requires for the official local language of every country where the patent or the invention will be recognized and will be released.In this connection, European Unions are requiring a certified technical translation of the patent. However, the new system of the European patent requires only 3 common languages that include English, French and German. Thus, a European patent applicant will be just responsible for the other two languages for translation. This may at least save some money and time, thus, this (relatively speaking) a no hassle system.However, the other members of the European Unions like Italy and Spain disagreed with the imposed new system of European patents. They were disappointed with the linguistic preferences of the EU. Due to the informality of the discussion and having some opposing panels of the imposed new European patent system, European officials are looking forward to a further discussion about the matter.So, if ever the new European patent system will be imposed effectively, does it mean that translation companies or translators will lose part of it or is it a disadvantage for their business?