The current pace of industrial globalization is making both foreign prior art and international filing ever more important in U.S. patent practice. This has left many American attorneys with no choice but to rely on translations, which is not only expensive, but can involve significant risks.
Risks arise from the reality that there is no such thing as a perfect translation. A word or a phrase in one language rarely corresponds exactly to a single word or phrase in another language. Consider, for example, that the English word “you” can be expressed in German as either the familiar “du” or the more formal “Sie.” It follows that no German translation of an English sentence including the word “you” will correspond exactly to the original. A choice will have to be made, and whether one chooses “du” or “Sie,” the resulting German sentence will be narrower than the English original. Because there is no single right way of dealing with such problems, translation is an interpretive art. As such, all translations necessarily carry the risk of loss or distortion of the original message.
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