The translation of EU trademarks – a special type of Intellectual Property translation

Abstract This paper looks at the industrial practice to translate legal intellectual property text such as patents and trademarks in order to examine if there are or there are not special approaches and methods needed to work on these texts and to identify some translation theories to see if these are or are not applicable to intellectual property text. The theories chosen are examples and far from being exhaustive. Intellectual property field is very wide so focusing on Community Trademark would provide a more focused approach. The paper shows that while many of the general applicable approaches/methods are applicable, yet the translation of trademarks deserves to be treated as a field of specialised translation such as medical or legal. The objective is to show that there are certain translation approaches that are useful for the translation of these types of texts rather than for general translation. This study is mainly limited to the translation of Community Trademarks of the European Union and comparisons which can be made with the translation of patents and or other specialised translation.