When filing a patent or trademark application in Taiwan, it is required to state the applicant’s name (and also the representative’s name for a corporate applicant), address and nationality in the application form. Currently, all application forms available from Taiwan Intellectual Property (TIPO) are in Chinese only, and the filing particulars of the application form should be filled in mainly Chinese, with English if necessary or available. Therefore a foreign applicant always has to translate his particulars including name and address into Chinese when filing an application with TIPO.
In order to simplify the filing process of patent and trademark applications, TIPO announced on July 20, 2016 that it is no longer required to provide the Chinese translation of the foreign applicant’s address in the application, so that the foreign applicant may now simply state the country (or region) of his address in lieu of its Chinese translation, along with his full address in English. Namely, a foreign applicant still needs to provide his full name, full address and nationality when submitting to TIPO a written application for a new filing or other matters in connection with a patent or trademark application but is exempted from translating his full address into Chinese.
It is to be noted that the above simplified process of TIPO does not apply to the patent or trademark matters pending in the appeal or administrative suit stage. Since an Appeal or Administrative Suit has to be filed with the Ministry of Economic Affairs or Intellectual Property Court respectively, the foreign applicant should still translate all his particulars into Chinese when filing said Appeal or Administrative Suit.
