Entering a new market is a costly endeavour for individual inventors and SMEs.

In order to overcome the linguistic barriers and to facilitate the further building of the European Digital Information Space, the European Commission is co-funding a project that will facilitate cross-language retrieval of patent information. PLuTO (Patent Language Translations Online) is funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) and has a duration of 3 years (April 2010 – March 2013). The project consortium comprises both academic and industrial partners across 5 European countries: the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) of the Dublin City University, Ireland; the Information Retrieval Facility (IRF), Austria; ESTeam, Sweden; Cross Language, Belgium; and the Dutch Patent Information User Group (WON), The Netherlands.

PLuTO will provide an integrated, online search and translation tool where several human experts (technical, legal, consultants) can take advantage of existing web-content and state-of-the-art machine translation tools to collaboratively search for, select and translate patents

See: openPR