News

A new partnership between the European Patent Office (EPO) and Google is set to enable faster and more cost-effective patent research, thanks to the introduction of free, real-time translation technology on the EPO website.

The partnership will enable interested parties to benefit from free, real-time translation of millions of patent documents covering Europe, China, Japan, Korea and Russia.

It is a significant development for European companies, inventors and scientists, who will be able to search for patents across all EPO languages simultaneously, allowing them to both save time and reduce costs during freedom to operate searching and patentability searching.

The EPO will provide access to its entire corpus of translated patents to enable Google to optimise its machine translation technology for the specific language used in patent specifications.

From this year onwards, visitors to the EPO website will be able to search for patents and patent applications in English, French and German – the EPO’s official languages – and translate between them in real time. The ability to translate to and from the other European languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian, will be introduced in phases, with the entire project expected to be completed by the end of 2014.

Commenting on the news, Dr Anna Molony said: “Although the EPO already provides machine translation of documents via espacenet, the quality of the resulting translations can be quite poor due to the complexity of patent language. There is a real need for quick and reliable translation of patent documents and we welcome this initiative from the EPO.”

She added: “Of course, these machine translations are unlikely to be as good as one prepared by an experienced patent translator, and it will still be necessary to have a formal translation prepared in many cases – for example, when assessing infringement, filing an opposition or validating a European patent.”