Struggling with Asian patent documentation? With more than half of all new patent applications published worldwide written in Japanese, Chinese or Korean, is machine translation the answer?

Asian patent power is nearly at its peak – with Japan, Korea and China among the top ten countries in terms of number of patent applications filed last year under the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). In fact, China has become the fifth largest patent office in the world.

But the rapid growth in patenting by Chinese Japanese and Korean nationals has raised concerns among patent officials in the US and Europe that speakers of English and other European languages will be unable to find prior art on Asian languages. An article by Emma Barraclough in Managing Intellectual Property quoted EPO head Alison Brimelow as saying that the need for a translation solution "…goes further than just managing numbers…" but is also about "…confidence in the system…"

The Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the Korean IP Office (KIPO) already offer such translation tools. In March 2000, JPO launched its online machine translation (MT) service that enables anyone to access computer-generated English versions of all unexamined Japanese patent applications published later than 1992 – free of charge. Furthermore, the machine translations are available in real time. MT is very useful when the English abstract does not give enough information for one to decide if a human translation is necessary.

Likewise, the Korean intellectual property office has introduced the K2E-PAT service – an English machine translation of Korean patent publications – as well as cross-lingual retrieval to the KIPRIS (Korea Industrial Property Rights Information Service) database. Among the documents are available in machine-translated English (subject to cutoff dates) are Korean unexamined and examined patent publications, unexamined utility model publications, registered utility models and more.

Now, it's China's turn. To meet global demands for Chinese patent information, the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) recently launched a free fully automatic online Chinese-English MT service for patent information searchers. The Chinese-to-English translation engine was developed by SIPO and its subsidiary, the China Patent Information Center (CPIC), and allows English language searching for the bibliographic data and abstracts of the published Chinese patent documents. On-the-fly machine English translation results of the full searched texts (claims, specifications) of inventions and utility models will be provided as a helpful way for browsing Chinese patent documents.

The machine translation tool involves:

• A method oriented to actual Chinese patent documents, providing a solution to both patent-specific linguistic issues and the requirements of linguistic rules and increasing comprehension of translated Chinese patent information
• A terminology database covering practically all technical fields, enabling the translation engine to adapt to patent documents with a wide range of specialties and terminologies
• A system architecture that’s seamlessly integrated with an existing retrieval system, and with the mechanism to function as a Web service

However, according to the Managing IP article, machine translations are generally far from ideal. Specialists claim that although they greatly lower the barriers to accessing Chinese and other Asian intellectual property, they do not yet have a high enough quality that would allow them to take the place of manual translations. In the case of the Chinese translation tool, developers of automatic software tools find that computers have a hard time working with the comparatively loose Chinese language structure where meaning depends a lot on context.

Also, the quality of machine translations could depend a lot on luck. Simple, clear sentences often result in good translations – although they could also come out as nonsense if they contain ambiguous language. Longer sentences will more likely be garbled and hard to understand. What is important is that a machine translation should be good enough so that users can decide if they need a more thorough human translation.

SIPO’s automated translation tool for patent searchers may still be a work in progress, although the organization is confident enough of the progress of the software development that it has released a test version of the system. But for those wishing to access Chinese intellectual property amidst today’s patent and IP activity boom, this is certainly a welcome development.