Andrew Joscelyne at Blogos reported recently that the European Patent Office is thinking of using machine translation to cut costs. Apparently it costs a lot more to file a patent with the EPO than elsewhere in the world, because patents have to be filed in English, French and German.

I must say the mind boggles somewhat. Why not computer-assisted translation? Repeated headings could be automatically translated but long sentences would be left for human translators (or as the Germans say, Humanübersetzer).