Mr. Marc Krier, Director of the Department of Documentation of the European Patent Office (EPO), and Mr. Barrou Diallo, Director of the Department of Applied Research and Development also the EPO, headed a representative group for a one-week working visit to SIPO, China. The two offices conducted the first initial talks on the cooperation on machine translation projects.

 

During the talks, Mr. Li Yuguang, Deputy Director of SIPO, expressed his welcome for the visit of Mr. Krier and all the other members. He also briefly introduced the latest developments of SIPO and the basic condition of the establishments of information technologies. Both sides said that EPO and SIPO have been maintaining a satisfactory and effective cooperative relation in the past two decades or so. In the future, both offices will continue to develop a solid and friendly cooperative relation based on this foundation.

 

During the visit, Mr. Krier also carried out seminars and communications with various departments within SIPO, such as the Informationization Office, Search Centre and the Information Centre. All the relevant departments gave a briefing on the progress of building up the SIPO machine translation system and shared the experiences of setting up the corpus (term-bank). A demonstration of the operation of the system was also given to the representative group.

 

The Department of Documentation of the EPO is mainly responsible for the management and utilization of patent information. Its internal machine translation system has successful achieved the goal of inter-translation between 7 languages (with English being the core language). The purpose of Mr. Krier’s visit this time was to initiate the cooperation of EPO and SIPO in the field of machine translation, gain some understanding about the progress and development of SIPO’s machine translation projects, and exchange opinions and experiences of both offices in this field for exploring feasibility and details of future cooperation plans.

 

Through this visit, Mr. Krier and the members of the group gained a deeper and more comprehensive understanding about the overall situation of SIPO's machine translation system. They also expressed their gratitude to the hospitality and friendly greetings of SIPO. The smooth beginning and development of SIPO and EPO of the contacts regarding the information technologies help strengthen communications and cooperation between China and Europe in the respective field. It also brings about the momentum for further establishments in IT (information technology) for SIPO.

2006-07-18

2006-07-18