Book Review: Translation Accuracy and Dissemination of Disclosure of Patent Information: An Analysis of Translation and its Influence on Patent Law

Disclosure? Dissemination? Accuracy? Why is translation so important to patent law? 

In Translation Accuracy and Dissemination of Disclosure of Patent Information: An Analysis of Translation and its Influence on Patent Law, Dr. Aline Larroyed offers a comprehensive approach to the influence of translation in patent law. Specifically, it provides answers to three key questions: 

1. What kind of role does translation play on the current configuration of patent law?
2. Does machine translation disclose patent information? To what extent?
3. What is the influence of translation on the different legal stages of a patent? 

The book is a result of Dr. Aline Larroyed’s four years of scientific investigation, three-year PhD at Maastricht University and one year as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. 

The book consists of eight chapters. 

Chapter 1, titled “Innovation, disclosure and patent law”, discusses the relevance of the concept of disclosure as a linking element between innovation and patent rights. It demonstrates that disclosure has changed, together with a tendency to growing internationalisation of the patent system, and with contemporary theories that approach innovation through a perspective which involves dynamism and globalisation. Chapter 2 describes the methods used for the research. Chapter 3 is titled “Law as a communication system and the patent system (being considered as a system) based on (especially machine) translation”. It provides a current overview of the systemic nature of patent rights, emphasising the importance of the advent of quality machine translation for a global configuration of the patent system in terms of disclosure and dissemination. Chapter 4, titled “Translation as a vehicle to patent rights”, outlines the features of the patent text in association with translation. 

From Chapter 5 on, the book details the results of the study. Chapter 5, “Patent translation and its influence on the disclosure of technological information”, analyses the level of disclosure of patent information through machine translation. It shows the results obtained from a sample of 100 patents, which combined different pairs of languages and a survey filed in by researchers representing the persons skilled in the art. Chapter 6 covers the multiple ways translation can influence patent cross-border agreements, approaching the language regimes of the most important agreements and debating mistranslations in the internalisation of these agreements into national law. Chapter 7, “The influence of translation on the different legal stages of a patent”, looks at particular office, opposition and infringement cases, in which translation played an important role in the decision. 

The last Chapter brings conclusions and recommendations, the latter relating to: the dissemination of the disclosure of patent information in courts and patent offices; translation and disclosure in the language regulations of the European Unitary Patent and Unitary Court; search tools and expert systems in terms of optimising the use of machine translation to disclose and disseminate patent information; and future developments and studies. 

The conclusions bring strong justification to the existence of the patent system, as they acknowledge that the advent of quality machine translation universalised the dissemination of the disclosure of patent information at the global level, as only a few years ago patent examiners were restricted to national prior art and European patent attorneys were struggling to learn Asian languages to be able to do business in countries like China, Japan or Korea. Even if a true revolution has occurred, that does not mean the patent system cannot improve in terms of the use of translation to disclose patent information. 

Author: Larroyed, Aline 

Published: 2019 

Length: 560 pages 

ISBN: 9781509917297 

Available on Amazon: €8,98 

ISBN/EAN: 978-94-6380-496-7.

Photo credit of the 2nd photo: Sherry Zeng