The language services industry is all about providing, well, language services. Services, as a rule, are something that are incredibly hard to patent or trademark. You cannot patent the act of translating any more than you could copyright a verb. This doesn’t mean that translation companies haven’t tried to get a competitive advantage by building and protecting their own intellectual property (IP). Usually this comes in the form of either patenting a technology or a certain workflow process. Most of the time, though, the technologies and the workflow processes are so interconnected that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.
