07/10/2013
Earlier this year, we reported on the European Patent Office’s (EPO) online patent database Espacenet, and its ability to provide on-the-fly machine translations of a wide range of published patent documents. This function of Espacenet (known as PatentTranslate) has been steadily expanding and currently provides free translation of patent documents from, and into, English for over 20 languages.
The EPO recently announced that Russian is the latest language to be added to Espacenet’s repertoire, with supposedly more than 1.5 million Russian-language patent documents due to be available in English at the click of a button. This will include patents and patent appications filed directly at the Russian Patent Office, as well as those filed through the Eurasian Patent Office (a regional patent office covering Turkmenistan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia).
Our initial check of Espacent indicates that the PatentTranslate tool is now up and running for Russian language documents, which published prior to 2007. Nevertheless, we suspect that it won’t be long before the tool is extended to more recent Russian language documents, and – going by the quality of the translations which are available so far – the Russian addition should prove an extremely useful resource for anyone looking to obtain general information on a Russian language patent document not already available in English.
This article is for general information only. Its content is not a statement of the law on any subject and does not constitute advice. Please contact Reddie & Grose LLP for advice before taking before any action in reliance on it.
