Asia IP

To break language barrier on technological information, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japan Patent Office (JPO) have announced the launch of the Japanese-English component of the EPO’s automatic translation service Patent Translate.

Over a million Japanese patent documents on the EPO’s global patent database Espacenet can now be instantly translated into English free-of-charge at the click of mouse. Reciprocally, Japanese inventors can read European patents in Japanese.

While the JPO also provides English translation of Japanese patent documents in its Industrial Property Digital Library, “Espacenet is more popular,” Kiyoshi Asamura, president at Asamura Patent Office in Tokyo, tells Asia IP.

Despite Espacenet’s popularity, the JPO’s translation service is needed. “It will be advantageous that two machine English translations by the EPO and JPO are available and we expect that misunderstanding due to inaccuracy of the machine translation may be reduced,” says Asamura.

“Japanese is one of the leading languages of technology, and a lot of scientific knowledge, or what we call ‘prior art,’ resides in Japanese patents,” EPO president Benoît Battistelli said at a bilateral meeting of the two offices at the sidelines of the IP5 meeting in Cupertino, California.

“Translation will strengthen the competitiveness of European businesses, which will now be able to better target their R&D by searching Japanese patent documents, while further improving the substance of their patent applications. Patent offices will also positively impact the quality of the patenting process. The European economy as a whole will benefit from high quality patents,” said Battistelli.

Patent Translate processes 14 other languages including Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

“We expect Russian to be incorporated, as Japanese examiners at times cite Russian documents in office actions,” says Asamura.

“Korean should also be added in view of the many patent applications,” says Kozo Takeuchi, vice president at Fukami Patent Office in Osaka. Takeuchi also tells Asia IP that he only see advantages in the use of Patent Translate.

Patent Translate was established to enable machine translations of patents to be possible in the 28 official languages of the 38 member states of the EPO, and also in the most important Asian languages by 2014. It was introduced in February 2012 and integrated into Espacenet. The service will represent the world’s most comprehensive multilingual platform for patent information, as Espacenet already contains more than 80 million patent documents worldwide.