LiveSide - News blog : Translator

TechEd Europe: Microsoft Translator Widget And APIs In Beta

Sunshine — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:03:40 GMT

Today at TechEd Europe the Microsoft Translator Team announced that the Microsoft translator widget is now available to everyone, no more invite requirement!

A recap of today’s session:

Microsoft Translator APIs and the webpage widget are now in beta
Generate a translator widget for your webpage here,

AJAX API

Detailed reference for the APIs on MSDN, Getting started guides for ASP.NET and PHP, Interactive SDK
20+ languages supported by the service now (the latest 2 to be added in the next few days – Finnish and Bulgarian)
New to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8? Try the “Translate with Bing” accelerator powered by Microsoft Translator!
Microsoft Translator powers millions of translations each day for Office (2003-2010), Bing, Live Toolbar and the unique Messenger bot
Commercial licenses for the SOAP and HTTP APIs are available at no cost. Contact mtlic@microsoft.com for more details

So if you were waiting for your opportunity to add the Translator widget to your site, here is your chance! Go, go, go!

Bing Translator: Hebrew Added, What Do You Want To See Next?

Sunshine — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:32:05 GMT

Hebrew has just been added to the list of supported languages of Bing Translator. You can use it in the translator but also in the IE8 activity, with the widget, with the messenger bot, inside Office and with the API.

There will be even more languages added over the next few months and there will be quality improvements for existing languages at that. Is there any language you are missing? Feel free to leave a comment on the team’s post.

Microsoft Translator Instant Answers Now On Bing

Sunshine — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:58:41 GMT

Wow, did they read our comments? More integration of the translator into Bing? You got it! Starting today you can translate a word or phrase directly on Bing.

How does this work? Say you want to know how to say thank you in another language. Simply type ”translate Thank you” and Bing will return the following:

Neat huh? If you want it in one specific language you can get it by typing: translate Thank you to Dutch

As you can see it will return the query in the desired language. But wait there is more! There is a different way of asking to translate too. Let’s say you are wondering how to say orange juice in Spanish. We type in: how do you say orange juice in spanish (it is not cap sensitive) and lookie:

Bing, there it is! Hello in Spanish?

Yep, works too! Awesome!

Now it appears that this only works if you have Bing set to United States (bah humbug), but hopefully this is something we really will see in other markets too.

TBot Alpha Testing II Started

Sunshine — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:57:37 GMT

We reported a few days back about Tbot getting its own Run time Environment. In that article it’s also mentioned that an Alpha test period would start soon. Well, that soon has come:

We’re ready to start the Alpha Test program for the new prototype of the bot. This new version will help us keep the services running while our team finalizes the new infrastructure required to run TBot 2.

Even though it is designed to handle much more traffic than the first version of the bot, don’t expect it to be as fast or stable as the current Live Agents version. It’s a prototype after all. Besides this announcement, Helvecio also points out the differences between TBot and TBot 2 Alpha:

- TBot salutes you automatically without you having to type anything. TBot 2 Alpha requires a first message.
- TBot 2 Alpha does not have a display picture
- TBot 2 Alpha supports language auto detect as source language
- TBot 2 Alpha support any-to-any translations
- TBot’s “tbot stop” command just halted the translation; TBot 2 Alpha’s implementation kicks the bot out of the session (just like how “bot*bye” used to work)
- TBot 2 Alpha does not implement “tbot start”
- TBot 2 Alpha supports Polish (however the dialog messages are not perfect)
- TBot 2 Alpha restricts the use of the special commands – only the person that started the conversation can change languages.

So how do you use this bot? Simply add TBot 2 Alpha to your contact list, invite it into your conversation (or start a conversation with the bot itself, you can always invite your friends in later if you want), select the languages and go:

Not happy with the language pair? Type “tbot change” to change it.

Happy testing! Oh, and don’t forget to let Helvecio know about your results! You can do so by commenting on on his post.

Live Agents Platform Retires Support For Bots, Tbot Gets Own Run Time Environment

Sunshine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:03:19 GMT

Tbot, the translation buddy for Windows Live Messenger has to go through some remaking as the Live Agents Platform is retiring support for the bots. As TBot is based on the same platform, the team is developing their own run time environment to keep the agent running. The team reports:

This is a significant change, and it will take us time to get to the same scalability levels Live Agents currently have. That said, we’ll be starting an Alpha test period soon – we'll let you know when we have instructions for this, as we'd love to have your help testing! Just be aware that interruptions will happen as we fix bugs and add more features.

We hope we can get the new version up and running soon, and meanwhile the Alpha Test version will be operating at limited capacity.

TBot v2 will have some of the new features announced last week: language auto detect and any-to-any translations. Also, some of the dialogs will change as the team tries to accommodate the new scenarios and language options.

The Live Search Translator has also followed suit in the Bing renaming and is now known as Bing Translator.

Still reachable at the same URL btw: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/. I wonder if this one will be remapped under Bing.com as the other services have, http://www.bing.com/translator does redirect to microsofttranslator.com at the moment.

Live Search Translator new feature: Auto-Detect your language

damaster — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:02:29 GMT

It seems like Live Search Translator just got updated with a new feature – the ability to automatically detect the language you wish to translate!

In the screenshot above, I simply typed “http://www.livesino.net” into the text box and Live Search Translator automatically detected that it is a website I’d like to translate and that it is written in Simplified Chinese. This makes my task so simple and saves me from guessing what language the website’s language actually is. Very neat feature!

What’s also new is the new “Swap from and to languages” feature. Simply click the arrows between the two language-selection drop down box to swap the two languages around. So if you’d like to do a round-trip translation to see how well Live Search Translator works, this tool makes it easy to do so!

It is also to be congratulated that they have finally gotten rid of the old “Wave 2” look at Windows Live Translator website (refer to this post for the story earlier this year about the branding mess with Translator). And it seems like they’ve gotten a new logo too! Well done!

Translator coming for websites; available for Office now

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:54:00 GMT

At Mix 09, the Microsoft Translator team announced a new web page widget, built on top of a new AJAX API, and put up a sign up sheet for anyone who was interested in trying it out. We hear those invites are about to be fulfilled, but when we saw that Long Zheng had one, of course we threw a hissy fit and got ours a little early. You’ll have to tell us how good of a job it does translating, but hey it sure is fun to see LiveSide in Arabic!

If you haven’t signed up to try it out on your own site, you still can.

In addition, today the team announced a new download, one that installs Microsoft Translation as the default translator in Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007, in the Research bar. Their blog post has links to the download.

UPDATE: The Translator team was kind enough to give us one extra invite key, which we shared with our Chinese sister site www.LiveSino.net, now we can read what he's written when he IMs us links all the time ;)

Windows Live Translator (partially) rebranded under Live Search

damaster — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:36:09 GMT

Together with all the new buzz with the latest Live Search updates, we noticed Microsoft silently rebranded their Translator service from Windows Live to Live Search – although this rebrand is long overdue as Translator had been under the Live Search umbrella for a long time. Here’s a screenshot of the service after the rebrand, fitted with the Live Search header:

The new service also has a new URL too, now located at http://www.microsofttranslator.com . Of course, the old http://translator.live.com still works as usual as well and redirects to this new domain.

Update: To add to this confusing branding mess, we discovered that Microsoft decided to leave the old URL http://www.windowslivetranslator.com with the old Wave 2 Windows Live UI with the old branding, while providing the exact same service as the apparently new “Live Search Translator”. Seems like instead of “rebranding”, they simply made two services doing the same job. Weren’t we talking about cleaning up the branding mess a few minutes ago Microsoft?

Windows Live Translator adds Polish

Sunshine — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:10:50 GMT

Windows Live Translator gained yet another language, Polish this time. This brings the total amount of languages to 14, namely; Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

The website, the IE Accelerator, the Windows Live Toolbar and TBot, all of them can translate from/to each of these languages.

[Click image to try TBot]

Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot: Time To Say Goodbye To The Prototype

Sunshine — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:19:00 GMT

As I already mentioned in my Windows Live Translators post, the new Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot (Tbot) has mtbot@hotmail.com as its Messenger addy. If you still have the prototype, mtbot-en_us@hotmail.com, on your list it’s time to say goodbye to that one.

It will no longer accept translations and will forward you to Tbot, if you catch it online at all that is! In a week's time it will be switched off forever as Helvecio needs to re-purpose his server for a new project that he’ll introduce in a few months.

P.S.: If you are experiencing trouble signing in to messenger (or messenger kicking you off), know you are not the only one. We are experiencing the same issues, it’s something serverside. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.

Microsoft Translation goes in-house

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:55:13 GMT

A day late on this one, but congratulations anyway to the Microsoft Research Translation Team for making the transition from a third party translation technology to going “in-house”. From the MSR-MT blog:

Translation now fully powered by the Microsoft Translator technology is available through Live Search, as well as IE8, the Windows Live Toolbar, and Windows Live Messenger.

All translation pairs on the site (11 English-X, 12 X-English) are powered by Microsoft Research-developed systems.

Two transliteration pairs (chs<->cht), courtesy of the Windows International team.

For several languages, better language quality.

And finally, the release of TBot, a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger.

We have a link to Windows Live Translator here on our site - just click the appropriate flag in LiveSide Central (and yes we’re looking for a teeny little Brazilian flag – no offense intended!). Has Microsoft’s machine translation improved? If you use it (and from our analytics we know that some of you do), let us know what you think.

Windows Live Translator

Windows Live Messenger Translator Bot now available

Windows Live Translators!

Sunshine — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:18:00 GMT

You won’t be Lost In Translation with these two:

Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot

A new version of The Windows Live Messenger Translation bot is now available! All you have to do is add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contact list and start chatting. You can have a conversation with the bot or invite a friend in, you can both chat in your own language and the bot will translate. The bot is localized into all the languages you find on www.windowslivetranslator.com, currently:

English to/from:
- Arabic
- Chinese Simplified
- Chinese Traditional
- Dutch
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Russian (RUS->ENU only)
- Spanish
Chinese Simplified <-> Chinese Traditional

More languages will be added in the coming months. To get a list of commands type “Tbot?” (without the quotes) in the conversation.

For this screenshot I have set the preferred language to English, else I’d just bore you with Dutch commands :P As you can also see in the screenshot the commands are numbered yet you use the text behind it.

Translate with Windows Live Accelerator

Also from the Microsoft Research Machine Translation (MSR-MT) Team is the Translate with Windows Live Accelerator. This Accelerator comes standard with IE8, the latest version of IE8, beta 2, can be obtained here. This Accelerator saves you lots of time as you no longer need to copy and paste text into the translator landing page. All you have to do is highlight the text you wish to translate, click the translator (blue and white) button that appears and hover “Translate with Windows Live”. You will see the translation in the preview box and if need be you can change the language.

If you click instead of hover you will be taken to the landing page where the text will be translated.

Notice the URL of the page you were on is already filled in, so if you decide you want to translate the whole page simply highlight the URL and click the Translate URL button.

Other options:

· Without selecting any text, right-click anywhere in the page and click on the menu item. Your web page will be directed to the bilingual viewer, and begin to be translated.
· Select a hyperlink, right click to invoke the menu and click on 'Translate with Windows Live'. The hyperlinked target page will be directed to the bilingual viewer, and begin to be translated.

Windows Live Translator now with Office integration

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:50:55 GMT

Windows Live Translator is coming to Office 2003 or 2007 as a Research pane option. According to the MSR-MT Team Blog, the new feature will be coming out soon as an automatic update to Office:

We have officially handed over our code to the Microsoft Office team for the integration of the translation tool directly in the Research Task Pane. Once they have finished their own testing and "flipped the switch" on their side, the feature will auto-update in existing versions of Office. I'll blog about that here again when that happens - at that point, no additional setup steps will be necessary.

However you can install it yourself now, if you have Office 2007. The blog post promises installation steps for Office 2003 “later in the week”. The steps for installation are a little lengthy, although not hard, so rather than reproduce them here you can just check out the blog post (currently the screenshots link to an internal website, so they don’t show up unless you’re inside Microsoft, but the steps are clearly laid out).

Updated: Office Live Workspace, Hotmail, Windows Live Translator

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:40:23 GMT

While none of the updates are in the “mind-blowing” category, three Live services have announce updates this week. First up, Office Live:

We have good news

We have taken all of the findings and with the help of the Office and Windows teams come up with a solution that closely delivers on our primary goal – to make integration as seamless as possible. We can now present to you a single package available as a single download, the “Office Live Update 1.1” which:

Installs the necessary performance updates so that we don’t make roundtrips, and makes the network stacks “smart” so they do the right thing for OLW

Installs the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant that ensures that logging into the browser essentially logs you in to Office, so you don’t get prompted again and again

Installs the new Office Live Add-in v1.1 which shows who you are logged in as right there in the menu flyout.

We have made this available in all our new international languages, too. Let us know how this works for you, as we are still working on further improvements. And, as always, we thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback because it really helps us get better.

Hotmail has been updated, too:

You can check out how snappy the classic version is when you try the following things:

Read messages in your inbox

Delete and move messages

Read messages in different folders

Check for new messages by clicking on your inbox or other folder

The classic version works the same, and looks the same, but now it is more like the full version, updating what you see on the screen without reloading the whole page.

In future releases, you’ll see more about how we’re making the classic version faster and also adding features to it.

The classic version works for a huge range of browsers: Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 2.0+, and other modern browsers.

Pulling in messages from other accounts

If you’re a paid user, we’re making it easier for you to add a non-Hotmail account! Paid users will see a link in their inbox that says “Add an e-mail account.” If you click that link, we make it easy to pull in messages from your other accounts outside of Hotmail. You can add a POP3 account this way. This feature has been in MSN Hotmail and Windows Live Hotmail for years, but now we’re able to automatically set up many POP3 accounts even if you don’t know your POP server settings.

And improvements to Windows Live Translator, as well:

English to Spanish general domain system deployed on live site

Our team is constantly working to improve our translation quality. As you know, some of our general domain systems are powered by third party systems, while we develop our own technology for these languages. This month we rolled out our own English to Spanish general domain system, which significantly beat our quality bar. Spanish is our highest traffic language, so we’re really excited about improving this system for our Spanish users. Check it out!

Link to Encarta dictionary

Have a word that may have multiple translations in another language? Take the example of “boot” – this could mean a shoe, or a verb talking about starting up your computer. The Encarta dictionary allows you to look up a word and short phrase and offer you multiple translations. In addition to the different variations of “boot” in Spanish around the globe, it also offers an alphabetical list of similar words to help you pick out which version you meant.

Star rating

Translation quality varies widely depending on the content being translated, and the training data we have used to train our engine. Help us improve the system by letting us know where we are doing well, and where we need improvement, by rating our translations. This will help us learn where we need to focus on improvements. This feature is located just below the translated text on the left.

Report offensive translations

Machine translation is an imperfect process – and it doesn’t always catch inadvertently offensive translations! Help us improve the system by reporting any offensive translations that you see.

You can read more about the updates by following the links.

Windows Live Translator updated

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:46:19 GMT

News from the Machine Translator blog (via Vasudev), that a new version of Windows Live Translator is available, including links to the Encarta online dictionary, and a paid human translation service, from Live Translation. The blog poster, Helvecio Ribeiro, a Microsoft Research Test Lead for the Machine Translation team, posted a quick webcast on SkyDrive which takes you through the new features:

The new features are only available for a subset of the available Translator languages, and you will not see the Encarta or Live Translator options unless you have chosen a supported language.

Encarta Online Dictionary language support:

English to Spanish
Spanish to English
English to French
French to English
English to German
German to English
English to Italian
Italian to English

Live Translation language support:

English to Spanish
Spanish to English
English to German
German to English
English to Italian
Italian to English
English to French
French to English
English to Portuguese
Portuguese to English

Not much word on other features/improvements, Helvecio promises a press release soon.