EPO and Google collaborate on machine translation

Under the agreement, the EPO will use Google's machine translation technology to translate patents into the languages of the 38 countries that it serves.
 
The collaboration aims to offer faster and cheaper fit-for-purpose translations of patents for companies, inventors and scientists in Europe. Today, anyone wishing to register a patent must do so in one of the EPO's official languages - English, French and German.
 
They then need to arrange for translation of the patent - at their own cost - into the languages of all countries in which they wish the patent to apply.

This complexity means that many European patents are not available in all national languages or legally binding in all the EPO's member states.
 
- The European Patent Office is one of the largest providers of free information on state-of-the-art technology disclosed in patents from around the globe. The partnership with Google to create machine translation tools for patents will help inventors, engineers and R+D teams to retrieve relevant documents efficiently - in their own language - from our wealth of published patent information. This agreement with Google puts the EPO at the forefront of efforts to strengthen the patent system's international character and improve its quality for the benefit of the global economy, said EPO President Benoît Battistelli.