Inter-lingual correspondence between the conceptual systems of patent law in Russia and the United States

Abstract

Due to its deep connection with international law and the requirement to register patents in every country where protection of an invention is sought, patent law requires an immense number of translations every year. Nevertheless, considerable diversity in national patent legislations around the world hinders translation of patent documentation because of significant terminology differences. This paper studies patent law terminology equivalence in Russian and U.S. patent law. The main objective is to identify concept correlation between the main patent law terms in the U.S. and Russian legal systems and to classify the identified term-pairs according to their degree of equivalency, pointing out problematic cases and suggesting ways of their resolution for better translation of documents in this field. This objective is reached through comparative definitional analysis of the key patent law terminological units extracted from legislation texts, monolingual term glossaries, and bilingual term dictionaries. Notwithstanding the predominance of full equivalents, the research shows that national patent law systems preserve their characteristic features which result in a significant number of partially equivalent and non-equivalent terms, many of which are related to the very basic patent law concepts such as patentability. However, no currently existing bilingual English-Russian or Russian-English dictionary provides up-to-date and accurate information about Russian and American patent law terms with all necessary remarks concerning possible differences between the concepts. The research results can serve as the basis for compilation of a specialised bilingual glossary of Russian and American patent terms which can be used as a reference during translation of patent documentation.