Language Translation and the Messenger IM Control

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As part of the Windows Live Translation service online, Microsoft Research have teamed up with Windows Live Spaces and the Messenger IM Control to provide a quick and easy way to translate messages to and from 13 different languages within the Windows Live Messenger experience online or in a conversation with one of your contacts on the Windows Live Messenger desktop client.

There are two ways of using the Tbot machine translation service:

  1. Visit the Tbot website and use the Messenger IM Control to interact with Tbot directly
    • In this mode, Tbot will simply translate the messages you provide to it.
  2. Add Tbot (mtbot@hotmail.com) as a Windows Live Messenger contact in the desktop client and include it in conversations with your Messenger contacts.
    • In this mode, if you add Tbot into a conversation between you and your friends, then it will translate what you say for your friends to see.
    • If they also have Tbot as a Contact, then it will remember the Source and Target settings of each user in the conversation and will translate both ways, enabling a full multi-lingual conversation in Messenger.

Interacting with Tbot online, the first thing you’ll notice is that the home page is a Windows Live Space so it contains some interesting profile details as well as the interactive Messenger Library UI:

 

If you click anywhere on the Messenger IM Control area you are prompted to sign in and then to select your Source (From) and Target (To) Language from the list by entering a number between 0 and 12.  Tbot can handle the following languages:  Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

In this online mode the Messenger IM Control enables the user to provide the text and Tbot responds with the translation as requested.   You can see how this kind of implementation of the Messenger IM Control, or even the Messenger Library might be used in international Support scenarios where the customer may be more comfortable using their own language, or the native language of the support professional is different than the person they are supporting.

In addition to this cool integration of three different Microsoft services, the Tbot home page includes helpful links to additional Translator offerings such as the full text online translator, a Windows Live Toolbar Translator button, a website translation add-in for your own website, and even a link to a professional translation service partner.

Thanks,
Paul Elliott