The European Patent Office (EPO) has made a further six languages available in its free machine translation service.

With the addition of Bulgarian, Czech, Icelandic, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian, the service now offers translation from and into English for 21 languages.

Launched in February 2012, the service aims to provide multilingual access to the vast collection of patent documents available on the EPO website. Patent Translate is accessible from the EPO’s free online patent database, Espacenet.

The result of co-operation between Google, the EPO and the national patent offices of member states, the service aims to help European businesses better search and identify relevant patent documents for their projects.

Languages are being gradually added, with Japanese and Chinese being two previous additions.

By the end of 2014 Patent Translate is expected to cover all 28 languages of the EPO’s 38 member states, plus Russian and the major Asian languages.

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

Discover more about Espacenet on the EPO website.

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