The European Patent Office (EPO) has added Russian to its free machine translation service, Patent Translate.

Meeting in Geneva yesterday, the heads of the Federal Service for Intellectual Property of the Russian Federation (Rospatent), the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) and EPO launched the Russian-English component of the EPO's automatic translation service, which will make more than 1.5 million Russian-language patent documents available in English free-of-charge via the EPO's worldwide patent database Espacenet.

The service now covers translations between English and 22 other languages, namely Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. More languages will be added in the coming years.