Report:PatBase/Viewing Results/Viewing Full Text/Viewing Non-Latin Text Records
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Viewing Non-Latin Text Records
Over 2008-2009, PatBase introduced full text original-language collections for patents published in non-Latin languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean patent collections, and full text Patent Cooperation Treaty (WO/PCT) records in Russian. During this period, PatBase also added some partial text collections, mostly including titles and abstracts, for seven authorities that publish in non-Latin languages:
- Bulgaria (BG) - Bulgarian
- Eurasian Patent Office (EA) - Russian
- Greece (GR) - Greek
- Morocco (MA) - Arabic
- Turkey (TR) - Turkish
- Patent Cooperation Treaty (WO/PCT) - Russian, Japanese, Chinese (Arabic is also an official language of the PCT, but whether any Arabic text has been loaded into PatBase is unknown).
- Former Serbia and Montenegro (YU) - Serbian
Although it is not performed via PatBase's machine translation tool for Latin text records, there is an option to turn non-Latin full text sections into English machine translations for SOME of these languages. See Machine Translations for Non-Latin Text for an example of the on-demand translation tools in PatBase.
When a non-Latin full text record is present for a patent family, the “Non-Latin Text” option will be present in the Full Text window, as shown in the figure below. Selecting this icon will display a gray box on the menu pane, showing the available non-Latin text records that have been loaded for the given patent family. The document numbers shown in this menu are hyperlinks. Selecting the individual document number of interest will load only that record's text into the viewing window.
The next figure displays a typical non-Latin text record in the full text viewing window from View mode. In the figure below, electronic text for the title, abstract, and claims of a Japanese application are displayed. Although Advanced Highlighting has been turned on using Japanese-language keywords, no highlighting appears in the original-language text; this is because the PatBase highlighting features do not work on non-Latin text (as of January 2010). However, the Control + F function (in this case, performed in Mozilla Firefox) will successfully find a keyword of interest (also demonstrated in the figure below).
The Japanese record in the figure above may be machine-translated into English by using the Google translation drop-down menu to choose from a long list of available end languages. These features are discussed further in Machine Translations for Non-Latin Text, in the next section of this article.
Editor's Note:PatBase's ability to display non-Latin text is a great benefit to searchers, especially those who are native speakers of one of these languages. Since this feature was introduced, the translation feature has been switched from a PatBase SYSTRAN translation option to rely totally on Google Translate, which offers a wider range of languages. To improve this feature further, PatBase developers could consider adding a highlighting feature for non-Latin text keywords. In addition, there is a functionality/workflow problem present when viewing translations of non-Latin text: navigating away from the translated text to view another family member will cause the searcher to lose the translation. Fortunately, the switch to Google Translate seems to have drastically reduced the time needed to generate a translation, ameliorating this problem.
