Tuesday 1 June 2010

A Word On Translations


As you will know, most but not all decisions of the Boards of appeal are given in English. Some of them are given in German, relatively few in French. Only very few decisions (i.e. those found worthy of being published in the Official Journal) are translated into the other official languages of the EPO.

Nevertheless, on this blog, all the extracts cited are in English. This is because I translate the relevant passages of German or French decisions, so as to bring them within the reach of a greater number of readers.

It now occurred to me that I should state this clearly so as to avoid any misunderstanding. The translations given here are in no way official or approved by the EPO. They are just a courtesy service I provide to the readers of this blog.

As I am not a professional translator, I cannot guarantee the exactness of the translations, and even if a were a perfect professional, I would still have to face the traduttore traditore problem. If ever you have to rely on a decision the translation of which you found on this blog, and if you cannot cope with the original, please have the translation checked.

I do my best but sometimes I might get things wrong.

2 comments:

Jeff said...

We have used rather low cost online translation services to translate patent related material. we have recently tried http://www.tomedes.com . got good results

Oliver said...

Thanks for the link.

Some (but not all) of the German decisions are written in very old-fashioned, extremely interlaced legalese. Although a native speaker, I sometimes wonder what was meant. I guess online translation would be completely at loss. But for most of the decisions such tools could be very useful I guess.