Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

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infoblog » Translation User Experience: Guest Blog — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:13:02 GMT

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re: Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

Mike Unwalla @ TechScribe, UK — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:35:25 GMT

Quote: The number one question we get is: Show me how it translates <some interesting example sentence>… We know that the hard problem of Machine Translation has not been solved yet. We are working tirelessly on translation quality improvements and expansion, but it remains a hard nut to crack – for anyone in the field.

One way to improve machine translation is to write clear source text. I would like to suggest that the Microsoft Translator team educates people on how they can optimise text for machine translation.

For readers of the MSR-MT blog, I recommend 'The Global English style guide: writing clear, translatable documentation for a global market' by John R Kohl, 2008 (ISBN 978-1-59994-657-3). The book explains how to write text that is optimised for machine translation. Although the book's title contains the word 'documentation', the guidelines apply to most business texts.

Best regards,

Mike

re: Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

Andrea Jessee — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:36:43 GMT

Hi,

thank you for the recommendation. We do, indeed, apply such guidlines to the authoring of our own documentation. But what a great idea to make something like that available to our consumers, especially those who want to use our service to translate their own sites.

re: Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

Tony Roder — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:01:11 GMT

I want to create two icons on the desktop, one of which will open the Translator for English-French, and the other for French to English. Can this be done and how?

Thank you for any and all useful information.

re: Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

MSR-MT Team — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:29:49 GMT

Hi Tony,

A few blog posts ago we outlined the parameters that you can pass to the site to achieve this.

Here is the blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2008/11/10/linking-to-a-foreign-language-web-page-with-microsoft-translator.aspx

As you can see, you can create a desktop shortcut that points to something like

http://www.windowslivetranslator.com/BV.aspx?lp=en_fr&lo=SS&a=

and that should work for you.

Let us know if you need further help.

thanks!

Vikram

Microsoft Translator

re: Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

Rick Smith — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:28:16 GMT

I think the limitations of machine translation are a huge issue at the moment, its great that these are being addressed and the outcome can only be a better translation systems for end users. The suite of Microsoft Translation services looks nice and although it's got a long way to go MS is onto a good thing here, with more input and dollars spent we should see some breakthoughs in machine translation. I guess for now the professional on-demand translation service is good for those that can afford or budget for it.

re: Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

Quality Directory — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:09:27 GMT

Even if the system sometimes chokes on the highly ambiguous sentences and produce funny translations, you have made a great progress. Keep improving it and over time, it will reach near perfection.

People should have restraint while criticizing a work-in-progress. Nothing on earth started out with perfection. Patience is needed on our part to support this web service and let it grow.

re: Translation User Experience: Guest Blog

Computer products — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:16:24 GMT

The limitations of machine translation is an issue presently, but it can overcome in the near future.