Faced with large and steadily increasing work volumes, the Patent Cooperation Treaty Translation Section at the World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva, is looking for ways to improve the efficiency of its translation process. A terminology problem has been identified, and attention has turned to automatic bilingual terminology extraction as a possible means of solving that problem. A project has been defined and evaluation tests implemented with the aims of automatically capturing bilingual terminology from existing technical texts and their translations, validating the candidate term pairs generated, defining an appropriate database structure and generating terminological records in an automatic or semi-automatic manner.