Clarifications of Newsflash 31/2006: Non-official translation documents in the DOCDB database

Newsflash 07/2007 

In our newsflash 31/2006, our users were informed about the inclusion of non-official translation documents in the DOCDB database. This newsflash raised high expectations among some of our users, in particular the supposition that high volumes of English translations for Chinese patent documents would be included in the database.

In fact, the number of translations available is and will remain rather low. The K(n) codes represent the nonofficial translations that are available in the EPO's full text collections. Typically, they are translations that have been commissioned during the official proceedings on an application, e.g. translation of a significant citation during examination. So, while their quality can be expected to be very high (manual translation), the amount of documents available will always be rather low.

Currently there are only two documents (both from Chinese originals) available in the database and five more will be loaded soon.

Kind codes K(n) have been chosen for this purpose instead of T(n) since the letter K is not used by the WIPO standard ST.16 definitions and the same standard recommends patent offices to use kind codes T(n) for their official translations:

T    Publication, for information or other purposes, of the translation of the whole or part of a patent
      document already published by another office or organization