Arcanum Development made and supported since its early days the paper, CD and HTML publication of the International Patent Classification (IPC), Nice, Vienna and Locarno Classifications in several languages. During our work it was also our task to check the completeness of translation and syntactic coherence of the translation. We have manually checked, reported and corrected thousands of errors in most European languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Russian, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovak.) It was a challenging experience to suggest translations for native industrial property experts in questionable cases. Naturally, in comparison to manual translators of a single language, we had the opportunity to check with programs many language versions parallel.
In 1998 we have prepared a Translation Support Tool, that enables checking completeness and accuracy of industrial property related classifications. The tool was used in five languages, including the authentic versions, to check missing translations and to eliminate duplicated terms.
During 1999 we have spellchecked, using self-developed spelling tools, the complete text of the International Patent Classification in the authentic languages (English and French). Special attention was taken not to report unique words on the field of chemistry.
Since fall of 2002 we work for WIPO on the translation support of the new, 8th edition of IPC, including complete new translations (Portuguese). We have tested a state-of-the-art translation memory tool against our terminology extractor that provided significantly better results.