One Year Ahead of Schedule Patent Translate Now Offers 32 Languages - EPO
17-Dec-2013
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Special to ag-IP-news Agency
MUNICH - The European Patent Office (EPO) today has added the final set of languages to its free machine translation service Patent Translate, one year ahead of schedule. The service now offers on-the-fly-translation of patent documents for all 28 official languages of the EPO's 38 member states, plus Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. It is accessible on the EPO's free online patent database Espacenet and the European publication server.
“We are delighted to complete Patent Translate today to provide the world’s most comprehensive multilingual platform for patent information", said EPO President Benoît Battistelli. “Patent Translate breaks down the language barriers to patent information, not only helping patent offices, but giving inventors and businesses easier access to an enormous amount of information about the latest technologies, which is so crucial for their R&D efforts", he added. “Its early completion means that we can use the coming months to further improve the quality of the service in time for the planned introduction of the unitary patent in Europe."
With the addition of Korean, plus eight more official languages of member states - Albanian, Croatian, Estonian, Macedonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian and Turkish - Patent Translate now offers translations from and into English for 31 languages. The EPO has also added new language pairs for French and German, now making it possible to translate from and into French and German for 17 of those languages: Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian and Turkish.
Launched in February 2012 and integrated into Espacenet and the European publication server, Patent Translate was set up to provide multilingual access to the EPO’s vast collection of patent documents. It is the result of co-operation between Google, the EPO, the national patent offices of the member states and other major patent offices worldwide, which supply patent data in their national languages to train and enhance the system. Languages have been added gradually, and its completion to cover all 28 official languages of the EPO's 38 member states, plus the most important Asian languages had originally been foreseen for the end of 2014.
There are currently around 12 000 translation requests per day on Patent Translate. The EPO’s Espacenet now contains more than 88 million patent documents from around the world.