New EU Patent Law
The new EU patent law set to go into effect 2014 will affect both patent lawyers and providers patent translation services. Currently, patent translators may be required to translate between any language pair for European patents – so long as the language is recognized in the EU. For example, in order for a patent written in Italian to be protected in Sweden, it would require translation services from Italian into Swedish. However, with the new law, the patent need ONLY be translated into one of the following languages: English, French, or German. This is indeed good news for IP lawyers and seemingly good for translators.
Effects
In the above example, an IP lawyer can easily see that there are two translations and therefore two translators required to complete the task. However, with the new law, patent lawyers may not encourage patents to be written in any language other than the three required by the EU. Thus an IP lawyer will request that the Italian patent be translated for example into English since there will be no legal requirement to have it translated into Swedish. It follows then that IP lawyers will reduce the need for translation between other language pairs, such as Italian and Swedish. This also brings up the question of whether IP lawyers will need translations between the three legally-required languages since patents written in German will be protected in the UK without a translation into English and a French patent will have legal standing in Germany.
The new law will most certainly relieve IP lawyers by reducing the number of required translations, but the end result may be that IP lawyers will contribute to a growing demand of native-English, French, and German professional translators – bypassing the need for other European languages. However, although patents will no longer need to be translated into languages other than English, German and French, translation will still be required from all other EU languages into the newly designated three. Moreover, for IP lawyers in the United States (or in the EU), a German or French patent holder may still want to translate their patent into English for protection in the United States.
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