Searching by publication language

[Bruce P.]

I was trying to search for PCT publications in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. When I used CN, JP and KR as the search term I got ZERO hits! I looked in vain for a list of the language abbreviations. The help screen which gave an example of "JA or EN" gave me a hint that WIPO was using its own abbreviations. So I tried "KO" for Korean and that worked. I then tried "CH" for Chinese. Nothing! Searching around the web via Google I finally found some reference (not from WIPO!) that related "ZH" to Chinese.

It would be nice if WIPO had a link to a list of language search terms right from the searching screen!

[Christophe]

Dear Bruce,

Indeed, the information is difficult to find in the documentation. We use WIPO standard ST36 for PATENTSCOPE (http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/standards/en/pdf/03-36-01.pdf) that says:

51. The lang attribute normally contains a two-letter code based on ISO standards for the language of the content of the element to which it is attached. In cases where the two-letter code is not adequate, offices are encouraged to follow the conventions established by the Internet Engineering Task Force and described in Tags for the Identification of Languages(
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt).

The ISO two letter code standard (ISO 639-1) is quite well known (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes).

Best regards,

Christophe