Intellectual Property Protection in the Caspian Region: Geoffrey Westgate’s Visit to Astrakhan State University

Autumn is traditionally a season of visits, meetings and different research and academic events. Having seen off our guest from Vienna Nikolay Telnov, we welcomed Geoffrey Westgate, another very important expert who is the Head of the Support Section of PCT Translation Division, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Mr. Westgate is a long-standing partner of our university. Thanks to the Memorandum between ASU and WIPO, he can regularly visit our university, give lectures and seminars and hold meetings on patent issues and protection of intellectual property rights. At the first lecture “How to Apply for Protection of Your Intellectual Property: Support Opportunities from the World Intellectual Property Organization”, participants learned more about WIPO itself, intellectual property and ways to protect not only inventions, but also trademarks and copyright. WIPO actively develops cooperation with ASU experts in various fields of scientific knowledge. Therefore, this meeting between experts of our university researchers and Geoffrey Westgate was of particular importance. Furthermore, Mr. Westgate held another meeting with ASU researchers, where the guest discussed peculiarities of intellectual property protection in various scientific fields with the university experts. Geoffrey Westgate also made a presentation on patent terminology for trainers and students of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation. Along with the planned topic of the speech, Mr. Westgate touched upon a wide range of issues and aspects. In particular, he explained in an interactive form why it is important to protect intellectual property, spoke of main goals and objectives of WIPO, its structure, as well as specificity of the Translation Division work. It was interesting to learn that its employees translate 3 million words a week, and that accounts to 160 million words annually! The main topic, of course, was covered in detail. Geoffrey Westgate spoke of the pitfalls in working with terminology, introduction of CAT-tools and further prospects of the terminology development at WIPO.