The Microsoft Translator team is excited to announce the new translation bot for Windows Live Messenger! This Messenger bot does translations for you. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and start chatting. You can have one-on-one conversations with the bot, or you can invite a friend and chat in different languages with the bot translating for you.  As usual, remember that machine translation isn’t perfect – slang especially will give the engine trouble.

You can also access Windows Live Messenger on your smartphone to use the bot to translate simple sentences while you’re traveling to other countries!

The translator bot is localized into all of the languages for which we have translation support on www.microsofttranslator.com:

The translator Bot supports the following translation languages (the latest list of languages can be found here): 

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Haitian Creole
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai

More languages will be rolled out over the next several months.  Start using the bot and let us know your feedback!

FYI – at any time while you’re chatting with the bot, just type “TBot ?” to get a list of commands that the bot understands:

Update (1/25/2010): Updated language list and links.