I read about this a while back and it's great to see it out in the wilds now. Alex blogs about and explains it came out of the Made in Express competition which is down to 10 finalists. Here's the deal direct from Ali Kalid:

"I have a friend in France whose English is not so good, so whenever we are talking on the MSN Messenger, I copy what ever he says, paste it into a translation service, then type my reply in English, translate it into French and copy it back in MSN Messenger. What I would love to work on would be to make a plug-in for MSN Messenger or use the MSN Messenger SDK to build a new messenger which will use a free Web service for translation, and do all of the above things automatically, so that he will see only french in his IM and i will see only English in my IM."

So there you have it - like instant Babelfish for your IM conversations. It's great to see people innovating on our products like this and I think the impact of this is yet to be really felt. It has huge potential implications for bringing people together around the world. Good look to Ali in the final vote.

Link to » Instant IM Translation  InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel