Facilitating Multilingual Patent Searches with EPO

Patent searches are not trivial. Every country files patents in its own language, databases are usually at a national level and access to these databases can require many different criteria.

To address this issue, the EPO developed Espacenet, the patent search tool par excellence. It offers free access to a wealth of information on inventions and innovation. With the adoption of Patent Translate, it provides access to patents published in 28 different languages and translates their contents to the user’s language.

 

What is Patent Translate?

Patent Translate is a joint patent Multilingual Translation service offered by Google and the EPO. The EPO provides the technical text corpora in various languages and Google provides the statistical machine translation tool trained with the relevant textual corpora. Thanks to this technological partnership, the EPO provides the public with easy and free-of-charge access to documents drafted and filed in other languages. Patent Translate is an effective, practical and user-friendly information tool: one can simultaneously compare the original text with the translations in different languages to build a broader understanding of the invention described in the patent.

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