Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog : Development

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

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!)