Brussels/Munich,
29 February 2012 -- In a major step to improve access to patent documents in multiple
languages the European Patent Office (EPO) today launched a new machine
translation service, called Patent Translate, on the EPO's website. The service
uses Google's Translate technology and enables translation from and to English for
French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish, covering approximately
90% of all patents issued in Europe. By the
end of 2014, the service will also be able to translate patents from and into
all 28 languages of the EPO member states, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean
and Russian.
"The launch today is a landmark
towards the removal of language barriers worldwide from patent documentation",
EPO President Benoît Battistelli stated. "Patent Translate enables businesses
and innovators to identify relevant patent documents and to translate them in
their own language. It also facilitates the implementation of the unitary
patent which includes an important chapter on translation. The new tool
underlines the leading role of the EPO as largest provider of free patent data,
and efficiently supports the objective of both partners, Google and the EPO, of
improving the accessibility of technical information contained in patents
irrespective of the language of the user."
"The partnership between the
EPO and Google is a great technical solution to the complex challenge of
delivering better translations of - and better multilingual access to - patent
information," said Antoine Aubert, head of public policy, Google Brussels.
"We're delighted to be offering the service in seven languages via the EPO's
website and the Google Translate service, and we'll be working to further optimise
our system - and make the other 21 EPO languages available in the coming
years."
The cooperation with Google launched
less than one year ago has already led to a significant improvement in the
quality of the machine translation of patents. This was achieved by the
introduction of several hundred thousand high quality translations of patents
in the seven languages provided by the EPO, which Google used to ‘train' its
Google translate system. Further gains will be achieved as more language
corpora are added over time.
A next batch including Danish,
Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian and Norwegian will be uploaded in 2013, and by
the end of 2014 the project should be completed for the 32 languages.
For more information please contact:
Oswald Schröder Al
Verney
Spokesman Communications
Manager
EPO Google
Brussels
+49163 8399668 +32
473 523 374
oschroeder@epo.org alv@google.com