EPO and Google Cooperate on Machine Translation of Patent Documents

This article was included in our Spring/Summer 2011 edition of Inside IP magazine.

In a speech in London in November last year, new EPO president Benoît Battistelli indicated that he would make the development of “fit-for-purpose” machine-translation technology one of the top priorities during his presidency.   Machine translation is important to the EPO because it is hoped that it will, among other things, facilitate the development of the unitary patent (for which see Ian Grey’s article on page 18).

It is in this context that the EPO have recently signed an agreement with Google to collaborate on machine translation of patent documents.   Under the partnership, the EPO will use Google’s translation technology to offer translation of patent documents on its website into multiple European, Slavonic and Asian languages.   In return, Google will be provided with the EPO’s archive of translated patent documents, which will be used to optimise Google’s machine-translation technology, in particular for the specific vocabulary used in patent cases.

Initial implementation this year will focus on search and on-demand translation for English, French and German only.  The project will be extended in phases to the other European languages and also to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian, and is expected to be completed by the end of 2014.

Although machine-translation is already widely available (for example via the Google translate website, Yahoo Babelfish, and indeed on the EPO’s own Espacenet), the new collaboration promises the further possibility of using search terms in one language to search for patent documents in other languages.  Such functionality should help in identifying relevant patent documents when establishing the state of the art for newly developed inventions, or when considering potential infringement/validity issues.

On the other hand, machine translation has its limitations - in particular it is not always accurate.  Patent cases can turn on the meaning of a single word, and for precise, reliable translation there is still no substitute for employing the services of a professional (human!) translator.

Resources:

“Benoît Battistelli to deliver key speech at UCL Institute for Brand and Innovation Law (IBIL) event”, EPO press release,  8 November 2010, http://www.epo.org/news-issues/press/releases/archive/2010/20101108.html

“EPO and Google break the language barrier for Europe’s innovators”, EPO news item, 24 March 2011, http://www.epo.org/news-issues/news/2011/20110324.html

“Google to translate European patent claims”, Financial Times, published 29 November 2010.

Richard Kennedy 24 May 2011

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