Russia and EPO Sign Agreement on Patent Translations

The European Patent Office (EPO) and Russia’s Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) have agreed to enable mechanical translation of patent documents from and into Russian, using the Patent Translate service, available free of charge on the EPO’s website.

The EPO and Google have been working together on this online translation service for patent documents, which is already able to mechanically translate between English and German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. By the end of 2014, the service will also be able to provide translations from and into all languages of the EPO member states, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Under the agreement signed in Moscow on May 16, 2012, Rospatent and the EPO will exchange patent documents in Russian and English to create bilingual sets of texts.

“For the first time in the history of the European patent system Russian-language patents will be made available to users. This agreement breaks new ground in the relationship between the EPO and Russia,” stated EPO President Benoît Battistelli. “It will bring the wealth of technology contained in patents to the fingertips of innovators in both our regions, removing language as a delimiting factor,” Battistelli added.

“This agreement will facilitate the filing of patent applications by Russian companies in the rest of Europe and by European companies in Russia,” said Boris Simonov, head of Rospatent. “This in turn will lead to further innovation in our two regions.”

According to the announcement on the EPO’s website, patent applications filed by companies from the EPO member states with the Russian PTO increased by 10 percent from 2010 to 2011, while the number of applications filed by Russian inventors and companies at the EPO increased by 19 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Author: Jelena Jankovic

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Source: EPO’s website