Spanish-Basque Translation of Intelectual Property text: patent terminology, strategies and structures

Abstract

The aim of this work is to show the problems associated to the Basque terminology management as far as Intellectual Property is concerned (PI in Spanish). The development and writing of Intellectual Property related documents, like patents, are made using a specific and complex language, which has its own characteristics as well. In that sense, we must state that the competence of the register and publication of the patents is competence of the Spanish Government exclusively. However, we may consider important to make a comparison between the translations of these kinds of documents from Spanish into Basque for two main reasons. On the one hand, Basque is an agglutinative language whose lexical formation is made by the addition of independent monems, so extremely long sentences are produced. On the other hand, there are hardly any terms in Basque for the translations of patents. As a consequence, the translator from Spanish into Basque will have to assume the responsibility of transferring specialized content without previous terminology references.