The European Patent Office (EPO), headquarted in Munich, Germany and Google signed an agreement to collaborate on machine translation of patents into 32 European and Asian languages. The signing follows a November agreement between EPO and Google to pursue the deal.
EPO will use Google’s technology to offer translation of patents on its Web site into 28 European languages, as well as into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. Google will get access to EPO’s current database of translated patents to help Google optimize its machine translation technology for the specific language used in patent registrations. The agreement is non-exclusive, and no financial component is involved.
The agreement is expected to help people searching for information on patents to scan patents on the EPO Web site in English, French and German (the EPO’s official languages), and translate between these three languages on the fly. The other European languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian, will be made available in phases, and the project is expected to be completed by the end of 2014.
Adding these translation capabilities is expected to help European inventors reduce costs and save time by searching for patents relevant to their inventions across all EPO languages simultaneously.
Read more: U.S., Europe Agree on Patent Classification Principles
Photo: waferboard/Flickr
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