Patent translation agencies: the two products, how to brief one, and how to judge the quality

Patent translation splits into two products that look alike and are not. A filing translation has to satisfy a patent office's formal requirements and carry the claim scope across without widening or narrowing it, and it is reviewed by somebody qualified in the target jurisdiction. An information translation only has to be accurate enough to read, assess and decide, which makes it faster and cheaper. Decide which you are buying before you ask for a quote. The four controls that protect quality are agreed up front: a terminology glossary signed off before work starts, a translator with the technical field, an independent reviewer, and a documented process you can audit.

Last verified: 09 October 2026

The two products

	Filing translation	Information translation
Purpose	National phase entry, validation, prosecution, litigation exhibits	Prior art review, freedom to operate screening, portfolio monitoring, competitor watching
Standard	Formal requirements of the receiving office, claim scope preserved exactly	Accurate and readable
Who reviews it	Independent reviewer, plus local patent counsel where the jurisdiction expects it	The requesting attorney or engineer
Typical process	Specialist translator, glossary, review, formatting to office requirements, certification if required	Machine translation with human post editing, or a single pass human translation
Turnaround	Planned against a filing deadline	Days, sometimes hours

Buying an information translation for a filing is a false economy. Buying a filing translation for prior art screening is money spent on precision nobody will read.

What gets translated

• The claims. The part that defines the monopoly, and the part where a single word changes the commercial value of the asset.
• The specification and abstract, including the background, summary and detailed description.
• Text in drawings, labels and figure legends, with the numbering kept intact.
• Sequence listings and formal tables in life sciences work, which have their own format rules.
• Office actions and responses, both directions, during prosecution.
• Prior art cited by an examiner, usually as an information translation first and a certified one later if it becomes material.
• Litigation material: exhibits, expert statements and the certified translations a court requires.

Where a translation is formally required

The pattern, as of October 2026, with the exact requirement confirmed by your attorney for each office:

• PCT national phase entry. Entering the national or regional phase generally requires a translation into an official language of the office you are entering. The deadline is commonly thirty or thirty one months from the priority date, and it varies by office, so take the date from your attorney rather than from a general table. The World Intellectual Property Organization publishes the system's own reference material at wipo.int/pct/en.
• European applications. Claims are required in the European Patent Office's other official languages at grant, and participating states under the London Agreement have reduced the translation required to validate a granted European patent. Which states, and what they still require, is the question to put to your European attorney.
• Direct national filings. Each office sets its own language, certification and formatting requirements. Japan, China, Korea, Brazil and the Gulf states each have particular expectations, and the agency you use should know them without being told.
• Litigation and oppositions. Courts and tribunals set their own certification requirements, which are usually stricter than a filing.

Why claim language is unforgiving

A translated claim is the claim in that jurisdiction. A term rendered more narrowly than the original loses protection that was paid for; rendered more broadly, it invites an invalidity attack. Several offices allow correction of translation errors, and several make it difficult, which is why the review step is where the money should go. Three habits deal with most of the risk:

• Freeze the terminology first. Build a glossary of the claim terms, the technical vocabulary and the defined expressions, and have the attorney who drafted or prosecutes the case approve it before translation starts.
• Keep one translator and one glossary across a family. Consistency across the divisionals, continuations and foreign equivalents is worth more than any individual elegant sentence.
• Have the target jurisdiction read it. A local attorney reading the claims as a local examiner would is the most useful hour anybody spends on the file.

How to brief an agency

• Purpose: filing, prosecution, litigation or information
• The offices and languages, and the filing deadline, with the date the translation has to be approved by
• Technical field, in enough detail to assign a translator with that background
• Any existing glossary, previous translations in the family, and the granted equivalents
• The source files, editable where possible, with drawings
• Whether certification, notarisation or legalisation is required, and by whom
• Formatting requirements of the receiving office
• Who reviews, and whether local counsel review is inside or outside the quote
• Confidentiality status: whether the application is published
• How questions reach the attorney, and the turnaround expected on answers

Quality controls worth paying for

• A translator with the field, not just the language. Ask for the subject background of the person who will do the work.
• Independent review by a second qualified linguist, working from the source rather than proofreading the output.
• A documented process. ISO 17100 covers translation service processes and ISO 18587 covers post editing of machine translation output. Certification is a statement about process discipline, which is the right thing to check for a supplier handling deadline critical filings.
• Terminology management. A memory and glossary held per family, and handed over to you on request.
• Back translation where the stakes justify it. Useful on key claims in a contested family, as a check that the meaning survived.

Machine translation, used well

Machine output is genuinely good for reading and triage, and the public patent tools are built for it: the World Intellectual Property Organization's search system at patentscope.wipo.int and the European Patent Office's translation service, described at epo.org. Use them to decide whether a document matters.

For filings, use machine translation only as a first pass inside a managed process with human post editing and independent review, and never paste unpublished application text into a public tool. The confidentiality point is the serious one: before publication, a disclosure is a disclosure. Agree in the contract where the text is processed, which engines are used, whether the content is retained for training, and who at the agency can see the file.

How the pricing is built

Quotes are usually built on word or character count, which is why two numbers for the same document can look wildly different. Settle these before comparing:

• Per source word or per target word, since the difference is large into and out of Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which are often counted per thousand characters instead
• Whether review is included or quoted separately
• Certification, notarisation and legalisation fees, which are separate from translation
• Rush charges and the point at which they apply
• Translation memory discounts across a family

This page covers patent work specifically. For the general service levels and how to brief a language supplier, see professional translation agency. For publishing your own material in several languages, which is a different job with different controls, see multilingual site architecture.

What gets asked about patent translation agencies

What makes patent translation different from legal translation?

Two things sit on top of the legal precision: a technical subject the translator has to understand, and a claim set whose wording defines the scope of a property right. That combination is why field matched translators and independent review are standard practice here.

Do I need a certified patent translation?

It depends on the office and the use. Many filings accept a translation with a translator's statement, some require certification, and litigation often requires more. Confirm the requirement per office with your attorney before you order, since certification is quoted separately.

Can machine translation be used for a patent filing?

As a first pass inside a managed process with human post editing and independent review, yes, and many agencies work this way. The claims deserve human attention and a reviewer in the target jurisdiction, and unpublished text should never go through a public tool.

How long does a patent translation take?

Plan it backwards from the filing deadline and allow time for the glossary, the translation, the independent review and local counsel comments. Agencies can work faster for a fee, and the step that gets squeezed is review, which is the step you were paying for.

How do I check quality if I do not speak the language?

Four practical checks: ask for the reviewer's qualifications and the field background of the translator, insist on the glossary being approved by your attorney before work starts, have local counsel read the claims, and commission a back translation of the claims on your most valuable cases.

How a buyer finds a patent translation firm today

A patent attorney who needs Japanese to English translation with technical review may ask an assistant for firms that do it, and be given a few names. Those names come from directories, bar association lists, and the firms' own pages describing their process.

Your brief, your quality checks and your pricing logic matter to that buyer only if some of those pages state them. Ask the question as the attorney would, per language pair, and see who is named. AI Knows Us can run those questions and list the sources cited.