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.

The launch of Patent Translate is another significant move to break down the language barriers to technological information.

Because of the new automated translation service, more than a million Japanese patent documents available via the EPO’s global patent database Espacenet can now be instantly translated into English free-of-charge at the click of a mouse. This major step offers access to Japanese patents in the full-text version, while Japanese inventors can read European patents in their own language.

“The launch of the Japanese-English machine translation tool is a major step forward for patent information,” said EPO President Benoît Battistelli.

He continued: “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 and patent documents, which are now freely available in English to engineers, inventors and scientists around the world.

Patent offices will be able to use the service in their daily work, which will positively impact the quality of the patenting process. The European economy as a whole will benefit from high quality patents.”

JPO Commissioner, Hiroyuki Fukano said, “In terms of the number of patent applications being filed with the JPO and other offices globally, Japan ranks as one of the leading offices in the world, signifying that Japanese patent documents have a high importance.

In addition, when considering the direction in which Japanese companies are headed in expanding their businesses, we see huge progress in their rapid internationalization. The European market is one of the most important ones for us.

Up to now, the JPO has taken a wide variety of initiatives such as enabling the use of machine translation in order to break through the foreign-language barrier and support users when they file international applications and enter overseas markets.

Through this new service, which forms a bridge between European and non-European languages, users will be able to refer to European patent documents in Japanese. This will bring both benefit and value to Japanese users.”

With the addition of Japanese, Patent Translate now enables free on-the-fly-translation of patents from, and into, English for 15 languages including Chinese.

Launched in February 2012 and integrated into the Espacenet database, Patent Translate was set up to enable machine translations of patents to be possible in the 28 official languages of the 38 member states of the European Patent Organization, and also in the most important Asian languages by 2014.

The service will then represent the world’s most comprehensive multilingual platform for patent information. The EPO’s Espacenet already contains more than 80 million patent documents from around the world.