Patent and Technical Translation Editing and Proofreading Services

A patent is a legal instrument disguised as a technical description, and its value sits in a handful of numbered sentences at the end. Translate those sentences into Japanese or German with a word that is a shade broader or narrower than the original, and the scope of protection changes in that jurisdiction — sometimes fatally, and usually invisibly until a competitor's lawyer finds it years later. Few translation tasks carry consequences this concentrated or this delayed.

We edit what patent and technical translation providers produce — translated patent specifications and claim sets, priority document and PCT national phase translations, office action responses and examiner correspondence, prior art and freedom-to-operate search translations, litigation and opposition bundle translations, technical standards and specification translations, engineering drawings and annotation handling guidance, terminology databases and client glossaries, style guides for technical and legal register, quality assurance and review procedures, translator qualification and subject matter vetting documentation, and client-facing service descriptions and turnaround commitments. Our editors work on the documentation that governs how claims are handled.

Claim language is where patent translation is won or lost, and the discipline required is unlike any other translation work: fidelity to structure over fluency, consistently, even where the result reads badly. A translator improving a clumsy claim has narrowed or broadened it. We write claim-handling guidance so the rule is stated explicitly — the claim's scope is preserved even at the cost of readability, and elegance is never a reason to change a construction; so terms of art carry their fixed rendering across the whole family, since a component called a member in claim 1 and an element in claim 7 has become two things; so the antecedent chain is maintained exactly, because "the said conduit" refers to something introduced earlier and a translation that drops or duplicates the article breaks the reference; so open and closed transitional language is distinguished, given that comprising and consisting of differ in scope in most jurisdictions and are frequently collapsed into one word; so the description-to-claim consistency check is a mandatory step rather than a courtesy, as support for a claim must exist in the translated description; and so anything ambiguous in the source is queried rather than resolved by the translator. Guidance written this way is what separates a filing translation from a general technical one.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished applications, client inventions and litigation material. We are editors rather than patent attorneys or translators, and we offer no view on claim scope, patentability or translation accuracy. What we can do is make the procedure precise enough to be followed identically every time.