Machine translation provides access to about 90% of all European patents...

The European Patent Office (EPO) in cooperation with Google has launched a new machine translation service in an important step to improve access to patent documents in multiple languages. Known as patent translate, the service uses Google's Translate technology and enables translation from and to English for French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish, covering approximately 90% of all patents issued in Europe.

"Patent translate enables businesses and innovators to identify relevant patent documents and to translate them in their own language," said EPO president Benoît Battistelli. "The new tool underlines the leading role of the EPO as largest provider of free patent data, and efficiently supports the objective of both partners, Google and the EPO, of improving the accessibility of technical information contained in patents irrespective of the language of the user".

Google said the system would prove useful even if results were not always "perfect."

"Using the EPO’s parallel texts, we’ve been able to improve our ability to translate patents," Jeff Chin, Google Translate's product manager, said in a blog.

"We share a similar vision to the EPO, that machine translation can help to overcome language barriers - and help to make the information contained in patents universally accessible and useful. While the improved system is pretty good, machine translation is a challenging computer science problem and does not always deliver perfect results," he said.

Chin raises a good point. Raw machine translation may suffice if you’re just casually communicating via social networks, or if you simply need to get the essence of a foreign language website. But if you need a translation of publishable quality, machine translation alone is not enough. That’s why you may need to consider human translation and editing of the source material in order to get the desired results, especially if 100% accuracy and high quality is your translation objective.

Alex Dupont

See Also

• How to make machine translation perfect
  Machine translation gives a good gist of the document on demand. Post editing by a human translator makes it an excellent translation.
• www.languagetranslation.com
  Providing translation and interpretation services since 1989.