Major economic changes, technology and information revolutions have raised the need for structural reforms of patent systems worldwide. Such reforms are all the more urgent in Europe where the fragmentation of the technology market has been damaging competitiveness. The lack of consensus on the issue of language policy has been recognised as one of the main obstacles on the route to a unified patent system. Opting for some EU languages over others entails an asymmetric distribution of costs of patenting between European companies, this, in turn, distorts competition in the Single Market. Considering the importance of patent literature in a knowledge-based economy, we decided to explore the issue of translation of patent information. We believe that translation has a democratising impact on dissemination of patent information on condition that it departs from the current translation regime to embody a more dynamic nature inspired by the activity of strategic multilingual monitoring.