Following the announcement of their intention to collaborate in November 2010, the European Patent Office (EPO) and Google have today signed a long term agreement to collaborate on machine translation of patents into multiple European, Slavonic and Asian languages.
Under the partnership, the EPO will use Google Translate technology to offer translation of patents on its website into 28 European languages, as well as into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. The EPO will provide Google access to its entire corpus of translated patents to enable Google to optimise its machine translation technology for the specific language used in patent registrations. The agreement is non-exclusive, and there is no financial component involved
From this year onwards, companies, inventors, scientists and the interested public will be able – for information and research purposes – to search for patents on the EPO website in English, French and German (the EPO’s official languages), and translate between them 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.
Read more at epo.org
Also see: EurActiv
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