The European Patent Office (EPO) 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 said.
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.
Source: Berin
