The European Patent Office (EPO) is adding a Russian-English component to its automatic translation service Patent Translate, under an agreement made with the Federal Service for Intellectual Property of the Russian Federation (Rospatent) and the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO), whose members include central Asian nations Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is the first time that more than 1.5 million Russian-language patent documents are available in English in the EPO’s patent database Espacenet.

“This new service will provide the Russian-speaking community and industry with better access to information on new technologies from all over the world, while making information about their inventions readily available in English to millions of users worldwide. This, in turn, will lead to further innovation in our two regions,” said Boris Simonov, director general of Rospatent said.

“The EAPO’s participation is a natural continuation of our efforts to provide access to Eurasian patent documentation for the world patent community via the EPO’s Espacenet,” said EAPO president Alexander Grigoriev. “We hope the Russian- English machine translation tool will become a valuable component in the creation of a multilingual world platform of patent information.”

On top of that, Rospatent also agreed to classify its published patent documents into Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC), a classification system for patent documents used around the world.