The World Intellectual Property Organization – a new partner of ASU and the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation

A really significant and important event for both the School and the entire Astrakhan State University marked the start of the new academic year: the memorandum with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was signed. This document entails:
– capacity-building assistance to the University for teaching terminology and technical translation, where appropriate, to Masters students enrolled at the School, such as help with preparing curricula;
– a terminology collaboration, whereby Masters students enrolled at the School shall contribute terms principally in Russian, but also in other PCT languages, for inclusion in WIPO Pearl after validation at WIPO;
– language assistance from Masters students enrolled at the School, whose training includes a significant technical component, for example, courses in oil and gas exploration, energy and fuels, mechanical engineering, information technology, and agricultural technology;
– WIPO’s consultations on preparing Masters students enrolled at the School to apply for PCT Fellowship places at WIPO;
– an expert assistance from the University to select trainers of specific scientific and research areas to work with the WIPO
Pearl database, for which WIPO will grant edit access to its PCT terminology database to nominated professors from the University;
– access to the online distance-learning course on terminology principles and practice in the intellectual property field offered via the WIPO Academy.

How it all began

Since May 2015, the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation has begun to cooperate with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. The WIPO is a part of the UN. This organization is engaged in registration activities (international patents, trademarks, industrial designs, region of product origin), in supporting intergovernmental cooperation on administrative issues of intellectual property, in the creation of technical terminology databases and so on. In the autumn of 2015, Diana Kadyrmatova, a graduate of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation (the only one from the RF), won a paid internship for 6 months in the WIPO terminology department. At the end of her internship, being the best trainee, she was offered a contract and currently works in WIPO on developing the WIPO Pearl database – a multilingual platform of scientific and technical terms, including patent documents in 10 languages (English, French, German, Russian, Japanese,Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic).
Geoffrey Westgate, the head of the Support Section of PTC Translation Division of the WIPO, visited ASU in July 2016 to attend the graduation ceremony of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation and acquaint himself with the University to enhance cooperation. It is worth mentioning, that during the 2016-2017 academic year Masters students were trained with the use of the WIPO’s multilingual terminology bases and received advice from WIPO experts. In September 2017, Karina Kulova, another School graduate, began her internship at WIPO. To sum it all up, the WIPO proposed to sign a formal Memorandum of Understanding with ASU. Our university became the first higher educational institution in the RF and the first official WIPO partner in Russia to sign such a memorandum. Russian is one of the official languages of the WIPO, and thus the School will now train technical translators and specialists in the sphere of patent technical terminology.