Now that the Web is more worldwide than ever, the number of non-native English speakers going online has ballooned, and yet online content in English still dominates. For these users, free translation services mean that an entire world of information can now actually be at their fingertips. We're doing something to help them out.

Translation now fully powered by the Microsoft Translator technology is available through Live Search, as well as IE8, the Windows Live Toolbar, and even a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger.

For example, to translate this search result, click "Translate this page" at the end of the result description:

Image of Wikipedia search result

You'll see the page in a bilingual view, with the original page on the left, and the translated page on the right.

Here's how the Messenger bot does translations for you. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and start chatting away. You can have one-on-one conversations with the bot, or you can invite a friend and chat in different languages with the bot translating for you.

Image of Windows Live Messenger translation bot

Here are the languages we support today:

  • English to/from:
    • Arabic
    • Chinese Simplified
    • Chinese Traditional
    • Dutch
    • French
    • German
    • Italian
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Portuguese
    • Russian (Russian to English only)
    • Spanish
  • Chinese Simplified to/from Chinese Traditional

We'll roll out more languages over the next several months.

To learn from Microsoft Research about how it works, check out Machine Translation. To keep up with new features, check out the Microsoft Translator team blog. And finally, to try out the service, go to Translator.

Or just click the Translate this page in your search results. However you use it, after you try it out let us know what you think!

Lane Rau, Marketing Manager, Microsoft Research Machine Translation team