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Google To Translate European Patents
An anonymous reader writes "Internet search company Google Inc on Tuesday said it has signed a deal with the European Patent Office (EPO) to use the company's technology to translate patents into 29 European languages that will pave the way for a simplified European patent system. Google's deal, which comes after years of infighting, is expected to make it easier for inventors and scientists from across the continent to access information on patents with the EPO that has 38 member countries."
Coming to a continent near you!
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
The EU requirement to translate all its business into every language of every member state isn't something that makes me think simplicity!
As if patents weren't vague and misunderstood as is, nothing like a google translation to make them even more easy to troll with.
The official EPO release: link
The EU Commission policy that started it all: link
right...
They will inevitably end up with mistranslations like 'computer chips' that become 'las papas fritas con sal de la computadora'. I wonder if they can uphold a patent with these kinds of errors...
I wonder do they use the automatic tranlator? The Finnish translations generated by Google Translate are hilariously bad!
"Patent: Inserting brown cat into sinusoid railway cart."
It is not easy for me to follow my company's patents when they deal with technologies we use and I am familiar with. I am sure automatically translated versions would be pretty much incomprehensible.
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I wonder if they can translate US patents into English...
that they've filled a patent for this technology?
Christ, I know it's futile to complain about the summaries, but "Internet search company Google Inc"! Glad I wasn't confused by all the other Googles out there. Any article that feels it has to explain who Google are doesn't really improve the SNR here. Huge chunks of the 7 billion people on this planet won't know what Google do, but they're unlikely to be getting their news online.
Machine translation of legalistic obfuscation? Google now supplies the infinite number of monkeys.
Purely in the interests of science, I have translated Amazon's 1-Click patent into Japanese, and back into English.
"Method and system, please place your order to purchase goods over the Internet. Order, the purchaser is placed on the client, received by the server system. The server system, purchased from a client, payment information, receive information, including identification of the purchaser and shipping information. Server systems, clients, assign an identifier to the identifier used to purchase information received by the client and the client is assigned relevant. Server systems, clients are assigned, including buttons for system and client identifier that identifies the item and send HTML documents. Received by the client to store the client identifier assigned to receive, HTML document is displayed. Depending on the choice of the order button, the client sends a request to purchase the item identified by the server system. The server system receives the request, the purchaser, at the option of the order, the order of the product due to demand, in order to generate a purchase order to ship products based on the information, the client identifier associated with a client Click buyer information are combined."
The situation in Europe is a bit more complex, but not quite the way you imagined.
The EU is not a single jurisdiction, in fact quite the contrary. Despite the common misunderstanding the supranational cooperation only extends so far, the EU is not a federal state. The member nations are sovereign and the courts operate in the national language(s).
The EU itself has to offer translations of its documents in all of the official languages of the member nations, however the same does not apply to any of the member states of course. If citizens of foreign nations, including EU member states, are on trial they have the right of course to an interpreter and translations.
As with all international law, also between European nations regardless of the EU, there is always the question of what the langauge of the original contract says. However as you correctly stated we're talking about patents and not contracts here.
The EU only includes 27 of the total 50 European nations.
No, but they key word was democracy.
Access to official information in your native language is a democratic right [where your language is the official language of said member country of the European Union].
The Vatican is not a member of the European Union.
Only member nations' languages are official.
The European Union is not synonymous with the continent of Europe.
You don't have to prefix the original language with geographic origins. It's Spanish plain and simple.
What you learn in the "New World" is a subversion of the language.
Patents should only be enforceable if official versions are available to product developers in a language of the developer's country.
Machine translations will not be considered official, so product developers will have to avoid infringing the original (official) patent which is in some other language. If machine translations are truly there for information purposes only, then that's harmless, but in all proposals so far, machine translations have been proposed because foreign language patents will become enforceable in the target country.
If you infringe a patent, you've broken the law. If the patent was in some foreign language, you are now being held responsible by your country for doing breaking a law which was written in a foreign language. That situation is completely unacceptable.
The state of machine translation:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Machine_translation_of_patents
This goes for all types of patents, but the problem is particularly acute for software patents because software is often developed by individuals and organisations with little funding, so expecting developers (mass producers) of software to hire translators is more absurd than having the same expectation of mass producers of pharmaceuticals or cars (which are always medium-to-large companies).
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_software_is_different
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I'm going to patent a hovercraft for transporting eels.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is there a patent on translating patents?
You never expect irony, do you?
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I certainly don't agree with you, it's not logical to believe the Church translates everything of interest.
The European Union and its institutions produces an extremely large amount of information. The Vatican may very well be interested in a wide range of subjects the EU is involved in, however it does not need to translate it to Latin(!)
The Catholic Church is more than capable of conducting its business in Italian or any of the other major official languages of the EU. The documents are already available in Italian. It would be a waste for the Church to even attempt to translate all of the information produced by the EU. They're more interested in understanding and influencing decisions in line with their views. This is about politics, not an archive.
Ecclesiastical Latin is used for edicts and papal bulls issued by the Church, not for every piece of information and communication. Since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Church no longer uses Latin as the exclusive language of the Roman liturgies of the Latin Rite. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia has commented that Latin is starting to be replaced by vernacular languages.
True story: Google originally used a translator for general documents on this. So it would translate e.g. from English Patentese to French, rather than English Patentese to French Patentese. The majority of the documents came out much shorter. One word, in fact: "merde".
There are plenty of machine translation conferences/shared tasks going on that are targeting patent translation (e.g. PatentMT - http://ntcir.nii.ac.jp/PatentMT/). Instead of just handing this patent task to Google, why didn't the European Commission host an MT shared task and give a prize to the winner? There are a lot of decent systems being designed by universities and research laboratories, especially in Europe. Oh, well, at least the European Commission is starting to adopt machine translation.
Y'd think!
What you describe is the current situation, but the European Commission has been working on a Community Patent since 2000 which will be published officially only in English and would be valid across the whole EU (of if they don't get agreement on that, it will be opt-in, and 25 out of 27 countries have indicated they'd opt-in). Human translations to French and German would be made (of all or part of the patent), and machine translations for the other 26 languages.
So, there will be a law in Spain, Italy, Poland, etc. saying "It is illegal to do anything described in the EPO's patents". And the EPO will only officially publish the patents in English.
Hard to believe, but that's where we're at now.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I'm glad Google and the EPO made this arrangement. This is a rational and inventive approach to the deadlock over translation. Now, hopefully, plans for a unified European patent system can finally move forward.