Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog : Announcements

Twenty is a nice round number – say ยินดีต้อนรับ (welcome) to our newest release!

MSR-MT Team — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:31:05 GMT

In my last update I had asked about what languages you wanted Microsoft Translator service to support. Thank you for taking the time to respond. We are pleased to announce that last week we added Czech (CSY), Danish (DAN), Greek (ELL), Swedish (SVE) and Thai (THA), taking our language count to a nice round 20.

Here is the complete list as of today:

ARA – Arabic
CHS - Chinese Simplified
CHT - Chinese Traditional
NLD - Dutch
ENU - English
FRA - French
DEU - German
HEB - Hebrew
ITA - Italian
JPN - Japanese
KOR - Korean
PLK - Polish
PTB - Portuguese
RUS - Russian
ESN - Spanish
CSY - Czech
DAN - Danish
ELL - Greek
SVE - Swedish
THA - Thai

You will be able to translate between these languages in all Microsoft Translator powered services including Bing Translator, Internet Explorer Accelerator, Office, Widget as well as in our APIs. Feel free to send in your feedback on the new languages via the forum. We do keenly follow your recommendations and requests as we prioritize new languages – so please do keep them coming in the comments section!

-Vikram Dendi

Microsoft Translator

Any-to-Any Translations and Language Autodetect now available for Microsoft Translator

MSR-MT Team — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:35:06 GMT

Today our team released some exciting updates for Microsoft Translator! It is now possible to translate from any of our languages to any other language. Spanish to Chinese? Arabic to German? Check :)

We have also added a Language Autodetect feature to our webpage translator. So if you’re on a page that’s in a language you don’t recognize, our translation engine will autodetect the language on the source page, and automatically start translating into the language of your choice.

We’ve also cleaned up our landing page to try and make it a bit easier to use. Let us know what you think!

In addition, some of you noticed that there was a bug for some PC configurations with IE8. There was a bug where the IE8 Accelerator did not remember the user’s selected language. With this release, the bug has been fixed. Thanks to those of you who caught the bug and let us know!! An added bonus: you can also translate from any language to any other language in the preview pane!

Announcing the Microsoft Translator web page widget

MSR-MT Team — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:04:00 GMT

The Microsoft Translator team is very proud to announce the technology preview of an innovative offering for web page translations. Attendees to MIX09 this week get a special invitation to try out the Microsoft Translator web page widget. We are also accepting registrations, and will be sending out more invites as they become available.

What it is: Built on top of the Microsoft Translator AJAX API (also announced today) it is a small, customizable widget that you can place on your web page – and it helps you instantly makes the page available in multiple languages.

Who it is for: Anyone with a web page. If you can paste a small snippet of code into your page, you will be able to display the widget to your audience. No need to know programming intricacies, or how to call a javascript API. No need to write or install server side plug-ins for your specific software.

What it offers: It provides a simple interface to anyone that visits the web page to select and translate content into a different language. You can see a demo on this page.

What is cool about it:

Innovative: Unlike other (including our) existing solutions, it does not take the users away from the site. The translations are in-place and instant. Users can hover over the translation to see the original.
Easy to Use: Adding it to your page is as easy as copy and paste. Using it on the site is as easy as select language and click the button.
Customizable: You can pick the colors that best blend into your site design. You can pick the size that would best fit into your design (in fact the widget has an adaptive layout that better uses real estate when very wide).
Thoughtful User Experience: Progressive rendering allows for the page to get translated progressively – without having the user stare at a white space while the translation is being performed. The translation toolbar that appears when the translation is kicked off provides a progress indicator, the languages selected and a way to turn off the translation.
Localized: The UI is available in multiple languages – so users that come to your page with their browser set to a different language will see the widget in their language.

Fun! What does it cost: It is completely free. You can put it on any site – commercial or non-commercial. You are only limited by the invite codes available at this point, but over the coming months we plan to make it more widely available.

What we are working on:

More polish: We will be looking for your feedback and continue to work on the fit and finish for the widget & toolbar UI.
More customizability: We will be evolving the default color palette available to you through the adoption portal. We will also be looking at your feedback on the overall design.
New Features: There are a bunch of very cool features that we are working on that will be added soon (your widgets will inherit most of these features). These include “Automatic” translations on page load, multiple layouts/views (bringing in the well received views feature of our bi-lingual viewer offering) and some surprises that we are working on with other teams at Microsoft.

Other questions:

I can’t get it to work. Where can I get support or provide feedback?

I would like to highlight that this is a technology preview release – so please do test it on your site before presenting to your users. The Microsoft Translator forums are now live. Feel free to head over and interact with other users. You will also find members of our team there who can help.

Can this save me the cost of doing human translation on my professional website?

Our goal (and that of most machine translation systems available today) is to provide what we call “useful” translations. While the technology is improving month to month, it will still take a long time before it can match human translation quality. We don’t recommend using machine translation for sensitive or highly critical information. You can learn more about translation quality here and here. You can learn more about how we do machine translation here.

How many languages do you support? When can you add support for <insert language here>?

Currently we support the following languages.

· Arabic

· Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)

· Dutch

· French

· German

· Italian

· Japanese

· Korean

· Polish

· Portuguese

· Russian

· Spanish

Polish was our most recent addition. Our goal is to keep adding languages as we get enough training data to meet our minimum (“useful”) quality criteria which include both standard measurements and human evaluations.

I am using a hosted service for my site/blog that does not let me use javascript widgets. What can I do?

We are looking to work with providers of hosted services to make adding the widget an easy process for their users. If your provider does not offer this, please let them and us know that you would like to see the widget work with your site.

Keep checking this post and our forums for announcements, known issues and more information. You can follow our MIX09 coverage on twitter and on Vikram’s blog.

Last Updated: 3/18/2009, 4:15 PM

New Blogger on the block – Please welcome Lane!

MSR-MT Team — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:43:24 GMT

I wanted to post a quick note welcoming Lane, who will be bringing you updates (more regularly than before) about what’s new and exciting in our team. Welcome Lane!

On that note, Lane and Andrea were at the MSR Silicon Valley Road Show event showing off our products and technology. Robert Scoble from Fastcompany has a video:

While still on the topic of videos – some of you might have missed news coverage from CNET News a little while back. We are covered in the last one and half minutes of this video.

-Vikram

Vikram works on Incubation Strategy for Microsoft Research Machine Translation team

IE8 Translation Activity

MSR-MT Team — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:12:31 GMT

Our friends over in the Internet Explorer building recently released a developer preview version of IE8.

There are a lot of interesting features in IE8 developer beta 1, ranging from improved standards compatibility to improving security through elegant tweaks to the address bar. Web slices, improved Favorites bar and the developer toolbar are some other welcome additions to the feature set.

The Activities feature in IE8 is a great way for users to access various web services in a single click. We are very excited to deliver translations through the Translation activity for IE8. If you don't already have it available through the activities menu you can get it (along with other great activities) from here.

For a detailed review on the Translation activity, and to hear it in "non product manager speak", you can check out Helvecio's blog post here. You can download the developer preview IE8 from here. More information on newer releases and other features is available at the IE team blog.

We look forward to hearing about your experiences with the Translation activity for IE8.

Happy Translating!

Vikram

Vikram works on Incubation Strategy for Microsoft Research Machine Translation team

To Bot or not to Bot (IM Translation)

MSR-MT Team — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:05:00 GMT

Did you know that MSN messenger recently became* is the number one instant messenger in the world? Last summer, thanks to the efforts of Helvecio on our team, the MTBot prototype project quietly launched – to provide a glimpse to the community of 28.6 million unique messenger users what might be possible when you combine machine translation technology with instant messaging.

The MTBot prototype project was released in May 2007 with the main goal to try to understand how useful machine translation would be in IM conversations. The bot acts as a human translator, participating in conferences and translating messages as they are sent by all parties.

A typical usage scenario would be something like this: let's assume you have a friend in Japan that does not speak English... Well, you would add MTBot-en_us@hotmail.com to your Live messenger buddy list, wait until the bot accepts your request (by switching status to Online) and then you would start your conversation by sending the "Hello" message... The Bot is going to wake up, and display a list of languages - enter "ja" for Japanese. Once it gets a valid connection the Bot will tell you to invite your friend to join the conversation. That's it... From this point on, everything you type will be translated from English to Japanese, and everything your friend types will be translated from Japanese to English.

Another typical use is as portable translator: using Messenger from any Smartphone a user can translate simple sentences when traveling to other countries.

As with any prototype effort, do keep in mind that this is experimental and there is a possibility the bot might be offline from time to time. The usual caveats about the quality of machine translation also apply.

We always appreciate your feedback and suggestions – so feel free to do so on this thread.

Cheers!

Vikram

* Update: The link pointing to the data on Messenger becoming the most used IM client is from around when (2003-04) it first claimed that crown. Messenger has continued that trend since then. (Thanks to our keen eyed readers for catching that one!)

Vikram works on Incubation Strategy for Microsoft Research Machine Translation team

Translate This and Translate My Page Functionality with Windows Live Translator

MSR-MT Team — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:26:00 GMT

Every now and then I look at visitor logs on the various personal and professional sites/blogs that I administer. It makes for a fascinating experience to see the many places worldwide that visitors come from. I have often wondered about non English speakers and how I could make my writing more accessible to them. While some professional and company web sites have translated versions available, in many user forums and communities across the web there have been requests for a translated version of the pages/posts. Today, on many sites, I have to copy the text on the site, paste it into a translator and look at the translation. It is cumbersome and not very seamless in an otherwise smooth navigation experience.

I am very pleased to say Windows Live Translator solved this problem with the latest feature addition that rolled out this week. Now on the Live Translator home page you will find a new link "Add the web page Translator to your site". By clicking on this link you go to a page that offers snippets of code that can be added to individual web pages for which you wish to offer translations.

The code generator will create the appropriate widget depending on the source language of your site. Refer to the Live Translator introduction post where Andrea listed the language pairs that we currently support.

So here is what you do to have a link on your web page to translate it:

Step 1: Click on the Add the web page Translator to your site link

Step 2: Select the language your web page is written in (source language)

For example: Since all the articles on my blog are in English, I choose English as the source language

Step 3: The code that you need to copy and paste into your web page's HTML is generated in the box

For example: Since I chose English, the code that is generated looks like this

<script type="text/javascript" src=http://translator.live.com/TranslatePageLink.aspx?pl=en></script>

Step 4: Copy that code and paste it into the page that should offer translation.

For example: On my blog say I want the blog post I wrote about Live Translator to be translated, I go into the blog editor and paste it like so:

If the blog or web page uses templates, one could also paste the code into a template - thereby providing the Translate This Page widget on all pages

Step 5: Enjoy an expanded (and hopefully more appreciative) audience!

The end result on my blog looks like this in the case of a single post translation:

The end result looks like this if I put it in the template (this allows for translation of every post):

For the more technically minded here is some more information on the parameters that the Live Translator accepts:

http://www.windowslivetranslator.com/BV.aspx?lp=en_fr&a=http://viks.org

where lp is the language pair (such as en_fr for english to french) for source and target languages. a is the URL you want translated.

The Windows Live focused community site ViaWindowsLive is making creative use of the Live Translator to make their site available in multiple languages (look on the left bottom of the page). I would love to check out how you might be utilize this new feature. Feel free to post a link to your site in the comments.

-Vikram

Edit: Updating the parameters link

New Live Search and Translation Results Integration

MSR-MT Team — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:00:00 GMT

Have you tried the new Windows Live Search? I have been using it as the default search on all my computers at work and home (10+ of them) and am very impressed by the improvements. While all the great new features are quite excellent, I am very pleased with the quality (relevance) of the search results themselves. The rollout was gradual, and most of you should be seeing the new search by now. If not, both the Live Search blogs have direct links to the various features.

On that note, here is some search related news for you from Andrea, your friendly neighborhood program manager for the Windows Live Translator Beta:

Windows Live Translator Beta is now directly integrated in the newest version of Live Search. What does this mean? When a search result (i.e. web page) has been found in a language which is different than the user’s language, and the Live Translator can translate from the web page’s into the user’s language, the search result is accompanied by a new link: “Translate this page”

(User language = English; web page language of all 4 search results = Spanish; translation offered: from Spanish to English)

A click on this link opens the found web page in Bilingual Viewer mode, allowing the user to see the original web page and its translations with all enhancements described in our previous blog entry.

You may ask: how does Live Search know “my” language? Generally, your system settings provide this information. You can change your language settings either in your browser which will influence the behavior of all language(or “market)-sensitive web sites, or you can define a “Display Language” just for your Live Search experience. Live Search’s “Options” menu allows you to select your preferred language in which the Live Search user interface will be displayed to you.

If you choose to select a display language there, it will henceforth be considered “your” language. Any web page found by Live Search that is in a different language from yours may be shown with a “Translate this page” link, provided that translations from the page language into your (selected) language are available. (Please see our introduction blog entry for a list of translation languages we currently offer).

That was Andrea, giving you the scoop on what to expect with the new search integration.

Many times, I find myself searching for deeper meanings for cryptic error codes that programs often throw up. Some other times I find myself searching for any information that might be gleaned about the latest Tablet PCs. These searches tend to turn up sites in other languages with potentially useful information. The new "translate this" integration into search is now a feature that I cannot live without.

Have fun searching and translating!

- Vikram

Welcome to the Machine Translation team blog!

MSR-MT Team — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 13:01:00 GMT

Welcome to our blog! We are very excited to bring to you news and insights into work (and fun) at the Machine Translation (MT) Group within Microsoft Research. We have great mix of researchers, developers, testers, program managers, linguists, designers and product managers working on MT here, and we are pleased to launch this blog as a way to connect with customers, partners and other friends of MT. We hope this will provide greater insight into the work we do and who we are, and we are very excited to be talking to you.

Machine Translation (MT), to those that don’t know it, is exactly as it sounds: using a “machine” (in most cases computer software) to translate text from one human language to another. There have been many different approaches developed in this area and results have been improving over time. You will hear from members of the team that have been working on this technology and hear about how the research breakthroughs are coming to a desktop near you. We will be introducing you to the team building the new Microsoft Translator and you will get some background on the technology used for the site.

RSS and Atom feeds are available for all posts or specific categories on this blog. For now anonymous blog comments are under moderation – I am hopeful that as long as spam levels remain low we can keep it that way.

Once again, thank you for visiting the blog! Cheers!

- Vikram

Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog : Announcements

Twenty is a nice round number – say ยินดีต้อนรับ (welcome) to our newest release!

Any-to-Any Translations and Language Autodetect now available for Microsoft Translator

Announcing the Microsoft Translator web page widget

New Blogger on the block – Please welcome Lane!

Vikram works on Incubation Strategy for Microsoft Research Machine Translation team

IE8 Translation Activity

Vikram works on Incubation Strategy for Microsoft Research Machine Translation team

To Bot or not to Bot (IM Translation)

Vikram works on Incubation Strategy for Microsoft Research Machine Translation team

Translate This and Translate My Page Functionality with Windows Live Translator

New Live Search and Translation Results Integration

Welcome to the Machine Translation team blog!

Vikram Dendi works at Microsoft Research as Senior Product Manager for the Machine Translation (MSR-MT) group.