Chinese-English Technical Patent Terms Search Service Now Online


A new “Taiwan Patent Chinese-English Technical Terms Search” database, established by the Intellectual Property Office of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, began providing a free online enquiry service on December 8 last year. This new service gives a boost to the island’s bilingual environment while improving the accuracy and consistency of translation. It will also serve as a basis for the establishment of a corpus for sentence-to-sentence translation.

The new service already contains more than 1.8 million Chinese-English technical patent term pairs covering various fields of technology. This will be a great help to patent examiners and translators, improve the accuracy and completeness of prior art search, and increase the consistency of patent abstract translations. It will also be useful to people who are applying for patents and will assist in avoiding duplicate applications; in addition, it will help foreigners to understand Chinese patent documents. The Chinese-English vocabulary of technical patent terms will also facilitate the integration of the technical terminology used in patent specification descriptions in different fields, and it will alleviate the problems that users encounter in searching for the appropriate application of English terminology for specialized terms and the new terms that are constantly being generated.

The Intellectual Property Office reports that the scope of its new databank encompasses academic terms from the National Institute for Compilation and Translation and scientific and technical synonyms from the Science and Technology Policy Research and Information Center of the National Applied Research Laboratories, as well as English abstracts of Taiwanese patents, Chinese-English international patent terms by category, and Chinese-English international industrial design terms by category. In addition to compiling Chinese-English vocabularies of terms for various fields of technology, the Intellectual Property Office has categorized the terms in accordance with the International Patent Classification. Plans are under way to add medical terms from the Department of Health, nanotechnology terms from the Academia Sinica, and other specialized terminology so as to continue expanding the breadth of the databank’s coverage. The public is welcome to use the new website, free of charge: http://paterm.tipo.gov.tw.

News Lexicon
Corpus: A large and broadly based collection of words and phrases or writings that have been analyzed and given special formats and tags to facilitate storage and retrieving as language materials.
Prior Art Search: Search and comparison of related patent cases, carried out before a patent application is submitted, to ascertain whether anyone has already been issued, or applied for, a patent like the one being applied for.


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