Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog : 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!

Have you seen the Bilingual Viewer?

MSR-MT Team — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:39:32 GMT

Our web page translation includes a user interface we refer to as the Bilingual Viewer. It offers 4 types of bilingual views which users can choose depending on preference. The side-by-side and top/bottom views offer synchronized scrolling, highlighting, and navigation. In the two single language views, you can hover your mouse pointer over a sentence in one language and the corresponding passage in the other language is automatically displayed nearby for ease of reference. Finally, we render the translated text progressively on a web page in order to make it more quickly available for the user to read, while other page elements are still being translated in the background.

To change your view, just click on one of the four options in the “Views” section on the upper right part of the site:

Side-by-side view:

Top/Bottom view:

Original with hover translation view:

Translation with hover original view:

Note: when you click on “Translate this page” while using Live Search, the web page will be opened in the Bilingual Viewer (in side-by-side view or the view you selected during your last viewing session). Read more about that here.

Check out the bilingual viewer today if you haven’t played around with it before! And as always, let us know your feedback :)

Have you tried the Translator AddIn?

MSR-MT Team — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:16:08 GMT

The Translator Add-in can be added to any web page and makes it really easy for visitors to quickly translate the page into any one of our supported languages. The translation is conveniently displayed side-by-side with the original page so that both original and translated languages are available to the reader. There are also other display options available to try out.

This is what visitors to your website will see:

There’s also a cool auto-detect feature that will pick up your visitor’s browser language and offer up the word “Translator” in their native language.

Have you implemented this on your web sites? What do you think? How can we improve it?

If you haven’t, try it out and let us know your feedback!

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 : Microsoft Translator

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

Have you seen the Bilingual Viewer?

Have you tried the Translator AddIn?

Welcome to the Machine Translation team blog!

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