Patent Translation Services
Filing-ready patent translation for law firms and patent attorneys: PCT entries, European validations, office actions and litigation evidence.
Last updated
- Working in conformity with ISO 17100 and an ITI corporate member
- 260+ languages, native qualified linguists
- Certified translation from £35, transparent pricing
- Same-day return available on weekdays
- GDPR-compliant, files stored in the UK
What we translate for IP teams
Patent Applications
Filing-ready translation of specifications and claims for PCT national phase, EPO and national office filings
Prior Art & Searches
Cited documents, search reports and competitor patents translated for examination and invalidity analysis
Litigation Evidence
Certified, court-ready translations of patents, file wrappers and technical evidence for disputes
Technical Drawings
Figures reproduced with translated callouts, reference numerals kept consistent with the claims
Portfolio Programmes
Family-wide translation memory keeps wording consistent across divisionals, continuations and renewals
NDA Handling
Unpublished applications under NDA with restricted team access, encrypted transfer and UK storage
Why patent translation is its own discipline
A patent claim is not a description of a machine. It is a legal definition of a monopoly, and every word in it either widens or narrows what the owner can stop competitors doing. That is why patent translation sits apart from ordinary technical translation: the translator is not just carrying meaning across, they are preserving legal scope.
The words that decide scope
English patent drafting leans on terms of art with settled legal meanings. "Comprising" is open-ended: a claim to a device comprising A, B and C still covers a device with A, B, C and D. "Consisting of" is closed. A translator who renders both with the same everyday word has quietly rewritten the scope of the monopoly. The same discipline applies to antecedent basis ("a fastener... said fastener"), to functional language ("means for"), and to the difference between "about", "substantially" and "approximately", each of which carries case law.
Errors are expensive in a specific way
In most translation work a mistake causes confusion. In patent translation it causes narrowing, unenforceability or invalidity, and in several jurisdictions the granted translation is the legally operative text: if the translation claims less than the original, the owner is usually stuck with less. Correction procedures exist but are limited, and a competitor can rely on the narrower scope in the meantime. This is why every patent we translate is handled by a linguist with a technical background in the field of the invention and revised by a second specialist before delivery.
Fidelity to the drawing pack
Claims, description, abstract and drawings must stay consistent: reference numerals, part names and units have to match across all of them. Where drawings carry text, our multilingual DTP team reproduces the figures with translated callouts so the filing package arrives ready to submit.
Where translation enters the patent lifecycle
Most patent translation is driven by a deadline set by treaty or statute, not by preference. Knowing which deadline you are working to changes how the job is scoped and priced.
Swipe sideways to see all three columns.
| Route | The deadline | What we translate |
|---|---|---|
| PCT national phase | 30 or 31 months from the earliest priority date, per office. These dates do not move. | The full specification into each office language, planned backwards from the filing date |
| Direct Paris filing | Inside the 12-month priority year | The specification at speed, under NDA, while the text is still confidential |
| European validation | A short window after EPO grant, per state | Claims or full text per country: London Agreement states waive some requirements, others do not |
| Unitary Patent | With the request, during the transitional period | A full translation: into English for French or German grants, into another EU language for English grants |
Validation and unitary translations run as one coordinated batch, so nothing is filed late in any state and every country pays once for the shared wording.
Office actions, oppositions and everything in between
Prosecution generates a steady stream of two-way translation: examiner communications and cited prior art coming in, amended claims and arguments going out. Because we keep translation memory per patent family, amended text is translated against the record, so the wording your examiner saw last time stays consistent this time.
EPO practice: the language regime
The EPO works in English, French and German. Which of the three you file in matters less than what happens at grant: before a European patent is granted, the claims must be translated into the other two official languages. These claim translations are part of the published patent and are read by competitors, licensees and courts across Europe, so they deserve the same care as the original drafting.
Machine translation has a defined place, and it is not filing
Free patent machine translation is genuinely useful for a first read. It is not legally reliable text, and no serious attorney files or litigates on one.
Our position is pragmatic rather than purist:
- Information-grade: internal prior art review runs through machine translation post-editing at a fraction of full-translation cost, clearly labelled
- Filing and evidence grade: anything filed, cited or put before a court is translated by a human specialist and independently revised
Certified translations for courts and offices
Where a national court or patent office requires a certified translation of a patent document, we provide the signed certification with the translation. Our certification practice is the same one UK courts and public bodies see from us daily.
Litigation and evidence-grade translation
Patent disputes are document-heavy and multilingual by nature: the closest prior art has an inconvenient habit of being in Japanese or German. Litigation translation has two distinguishing features: the volume is unpredictable, and the standard is absolute, because the other side's translators will be looking for daylight between your translation and the original.
What we translate in disputes
- Prior art for invalidity attacks and defences: patents, journal articles, product manuals, standards documents
- The patent in suit where proceedings run in another language, including certified translations for the court file
- File wrapper material: examination correspondence relied on for prosecution history arguments
- Evidence: technical reports, laboratory notebooks, internal correspondence produced in disclosure
- Expert reports travelling in either direction between jurisdictions
Two service levels, chosen deliberately
Litigation teams rarely need every document at evidence grade. The economical pattern we run for law firms: information-grade translation across the full disclosure set to find what matters, then evidence-grade certified translation of the documents that will actually be relied on. You choose the level per document; we flag anything where the information-grade text looks material enough to warrant upgrading. Our legal translation practice supports the surrounding case documents: witness statements, contracts, licences and correspondence.
The four pairs that decide portfolios
Four language pairs dominate serious patent work, because they map to the world's largest filing offices alongside the EPO and USPTO. Each has failure modes that generalist translators fall into.
German
German technical drafting builds long compound nouns that pack an entire claim limitation into one word, and unpacking them wrongly changes scope. German also distinguishes shades of connection ("verbunden", "gekoppelt", "befestigt") that must map consistently onto "connected", "coupled" and "fixed" throughout a family, not interchangeably within one document.
Japanese
Japanese claims routinely omit grammatical subjects and plurals, both of which English claims cannot live without, so the translator is constantly making scope decisions that must be technically informed rather than guessed. Katakana loanwords look like English but often are not the term the drafter meant, and JPO conventions for reference wording differ enough from EPO style that a literal rendering reads as ambiguous.
Chinese
Chinese has no articles and no inflection for number, while CNIPA practice leans on the particle 所述 ("the said") to carry antecedent basis. Translating in either direction means rebuilding the claim's internal reference structure explicitly, and doing it the same way every time it appears.
Korean
KIPO filings combine Sino-Korean technical vocabulary with conventions borrowed from Japanese practice, and the same care over subjects, number and antecedent basis applies. For all four pairs our translators work into their native language with a second specialist reviewing against the source, claim by claim.
Confidentiality, deadlines and cost control
Three operational things matter to every patent client, whatever the technology.
Confidentiality that assumes the worst
Unpublished applications are among the most sensitive documents a company owns: premature disclosure can destroy novelty. Patent work runs under NDA by default, access inside our team is restricted to the linguists on the job, files move over encrypted transfer and are stored in the UK, and we are happy to work inside your own secure environment where firm policy requires it. We sign your confidentiality terms rather than asking you to accept ours.
Deadlines that do not move
National phase dates, validation windows and office action terms are statutory. Our workflow is built backwards from the filing date with an internal buffer, and our urgent service exists for the genuinely compressed cases: a same-week specification translation is unusual but achievable when it has to be.
Cost control without scope risk
Patent translation is priced per word, typically £0.14 to £0.20 depending on the language pair and the technical field. Two mechanisms keep programme costs down honestly. Translation memory across a patent family means divisionals, continuations and amended texts reuse approved wording, with repetition discounts of up to 50% applied automatically. And the information-grade tier via post-edited machine translation gives you a defensible cheap option for the documents that only need to be understood, never filed. The online quote prices a specific document in minutes; for portfolio programmes, our enterprise arrangements add volume rates and consolidated invoicing.
Our process, end to end
NDA Signature
Confidentiality agreement
Technical Translation
Claims, specifications, drawings
Legal Review
Patent law compliance
Formatted Delivery
Office-ready format
Built for these teams
Law Firms
- Patent litigation
- IP portfolios
- Infringement cases
Corporations
- R&D patents
- Product patents
- Process patents
Patent Offices
- National filings
- International applications
- Renewals
What you get with Lingo Service
Technical Expertise
Translators with engineering and science backgrounds matched to the field of the invention
Legal Accuracy
Claim language kept legally exact, from antecedent basis to comprising versus consisting of
Confidential by Default
NDA-backed handling with access restricted to the linguists on your matter
Deadline-Driven
Workflow planned backwards from national phase and validation dates with an internal buffer
260+ language pairs. These are our most-requested.
Frequently asked questions
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