MAT is a free technology powered by Microsoft Translator’s automatic translation engine which makes localization painless– whether you are adding the language features to a Windows, Windows Phone, or traditional desktop app. Check out the full video below to discover all of the cool features of the MAT, and immediately take advantage of greater reach in today’s global marketplace.

For more information on the Multilingual App Toolkit, you can also click here.

The post Quicker and Cheaper Localization with the Multilingual App Toolkit appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

This release provides several key fixes as well as new and improved features including:

• Visual Studio Online builds
• Expanded import, export and recycling
• Improved translation and suggestion results
• As well as a number of key fixes

The MAT team really focused on key features as well as addressing both reported and non-reported issues in this release. A huge congratulations to the MAT team and their great work delivering this latest release!

Please note that due to updates to the setup process, you will need to perform a one-time uninstall of MAT v3.0 or earlier before installing v3.1.

Get Started Using MAT Today

• Multilingual App Toolkit Team Announcement 
• BUILD Conference Session
• Multilingual App Toolkit on Windows Dev Center
• How to Use the Multilingual App Toolkit
• Introduction to the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Build multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Test multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit
• Localize multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Submitting your localized app to the Windows Store

The post Multilingual App Toolkit 3.1 Launched – Localize Your App, Extend Your Reach appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

The song translation app allows users to upload their favorite songs with lyrics, add timestamps to the lyrics, then translate and record the song in another language. Song Translator leverages the Translator Control while also leveraging other key Microsoft technologies and features including: Windows 8, Visual Studio, Background Task for live tiles, and Windows Azure Cloud Storage, as well as pitch synthesis from SonicAPI.

Built in Visual Studio 2012 with C# and XAML using the Windows 8 Store App template, the app calls the Translator API to process the translations into over 40 of the Translator supported languages.

Watch the Song Translator Demo from Michelle, Priya, and Kat

 [View:http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-91-16/3364.Song-Translator-Demo.mp4]

 How to Use the Song Translator

1. Download the app
2. Unzip the project
3. Install the Nuget package for the Mobile Service
4. Open the configurations file and input credentials

Check out the walk through guides written by our Interns to learn more.

• Using the Song Translator App
• Leveraging Azure Storage
• Using Background Tasks for Live Tiles
• Song Synthesis and SonicaAPI

To learn more about our talented group of summer interns and their experience, make sure to check out the Microsoft Research blog post.

.

The post Summer Interns Singing a Happy Tune with Song Translator App appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

The Microsoft Translator and Bing Webmaster teams are announcing the new and improved Translator Widget. Built on the Microsoft Translator API the widget is a highly customizable and powerful translation tool you can place on your web page, instantly making the page available in 40+ languages. The redesigned widget provides a look and functionality best suited to today’s modern websites, while maintaining the features and functionality users love.

As part of Bing and Microsoft Research’s commitment to innovation in partnership with Intel, the next generation widget is powering the Tomorrow Project’s Future Powered by Fiction Contest web site. Real time translation by the Translator Widget empowers visitors to the site from across the globe to explore and share their creative vision for a better tomorrow.

As a free HTML/JavaScript app, the Translator Widget allows you to bring real-time, in-place translation to any web site. Visitors can see your pages in their own language, without having to go to a separate translation web site. Visitors to your site can also help you enhance the translations on your website by suggesting better translations for specific sentences, and you may invite others to turn these suggestions into authoritative corrections for all visitors.

Webmasters, developers, bloggers, or anyone with a webpage will be able to leverage the widget to expand their audience. The best part is, you don’t have to write new code to leverage the Translator widget. If you can paste a small snippet of JavaScript into your page, you will be able to display the widget to your audience. No need to know programming intricacies, or how to call an API. No need to write or install server side plug-ins for your specific software. Just copy, paste, and enable your visitors to translate!

For more advanced users, go beyond the basic and leverage the customization capabilities to modify the widget look and feel to best complement your web site. Pick the colors that blend into your site design or the size that best fits into your layout. The widget’s adaptive positioning allows you to better uses real estate for wide layout designs.

Webmasters can also enable the collaborative translation framework (CTF) to harness the power of their user community to improve translations over time. When enabled, PC users simply hover over the text to have the tooltip display “Improve Translation” when CTF is turned on. Touch devices simply click on the translated sentence to display the tool tip in their native language.

Learn more about how you can leverage the widget on your site today, via the getting started guide links included below. If you are using the widget already, or are a webmaster looking to grow your user audience, check out the new widget and begin translating right away, there is no cost to it!

The Translator fully supports customized machine translation systems, using the Translator Hub.

Getting Started Guides:

• Getting Started with the Translator Widget
• Getting Started with the Translator Widget – Using Collaborative Translation
• Embed and Customize the Widget
• Advanced Customization of the Translator Widget
• FAQ

The post Announcing the Next Generation of the Bing Translator Widget – Powering the Tomorrow Project appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Today at BUILD, Microsoft announced the preview of the Bing Translator Control for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

With the Translator control developers get easy access to robust, cloud-based, automatic translation between more than 40 languages. The Translator control gives the Windows 8 developer access to machine translation services, which is built on over a decade of natural language research from Microsoft Research. After download and one-time authentication, you can simply place the Bing Translator control in your app, feed it a string to translate, and receive the translation. 

The Bing Translator control, powered by the flexible Microsoft Translator API puts the power of a world class machine translation system in your hands. Designed to enable a variety of scenarios, it is available in a number of developer friendly protocols.

The control takes the text you pass in to the Bing Translator web service for translation, and then passes the translation of the input back to you. Your application can handle the return text however you see fit. You receive the text to translate by any method, and render it by any means you choose-  using the Translator Control in the middle, in order to translate the input text to the target language.

Get started with the Translator Control today!

Download the Translator Control

Sign Up for the Translator Service

Get Samples and Documentation

The post Announcing Today at BUILD – Bing Translator Control for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

With the proliferation of digital content on the web, mobile devices, and desktop applications, there is an increasing demand to communicate and collaborate in multiple languages. Helping enable business, communities, and consumers to communicate and collaborate across language barriers through technology innovation is a core focus for the Microsoft Translator team.

Today, I am pleased to announce the launch of two new officially supported languages: Malay and Urdu. These two languages join the other languages already supported by the Microsoft Translator platform and Bing Translator. Malay is spoken by over 200M people worldwide in countries ranging from Malaysia to Brunei. Urdu is spoken by over 100M people worldwide and is spoken by large populations residing in the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and countries in Europe and North America. It is the national language of Pakistan and the official language of several states in India.

A year ago, on the last International Mother Language Day, we announced the release of Hmong as part of a close engagement between Microsoft and the Hmong community – a small but significant step towards empowering businesses and organizations to tap into the power of Microsoft’s language technology. Like Hmong, the development of Urdu is the result of a community effort shepherded by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India) under the leadership of Dr.Girish Nath Jha, and Microsoft, utilizing the powerful Microsoft Translator Hub customization tools.

In addition to the launch of these new languages; we are also rolling out several new improvements to our platform, customization tools, and language quality. See the release notes for this release in our forum here.

We have seen some great momentum with both the business and language communities for the Translator Hub. Through the Hub, users are able to bring better and specialized translation quality to established languages, as well as the many native languages of the world that are not yet supported by major translation providers which go to the core of supporting the goals of Mother Language Day. Urdu is the latest language community benefiting from the availability of the Hub.  If you are passionate about the community development efforts around Urdu or other languages that we support and want to become involved in the efforts, please contact us.

Commemorating the International Mother Language Day, Microsoft Local Language Program (LLP), also announced the support of 13 extra languages to our range of Language Interface Packs (LIPs), bringing the total number of languages supported by Windows 8 and Office to 108. Learn more at the LLP website.

– Vikram Dendi,
Director of Product Management,
Microsoft/Bing Translator

The post Celebrating International Mother Language Day with the Launch of New Languages & Features appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

At X’Caret, the Mayan eco-archaeological park in Carmen Del playa, the Rector of the Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, Professor Francisco Rosado-May and I along with Governor of Quintara Roo, Roberto Borge Angulo, unveiled the custom Mayan to Spanish translation system to demonstrate it to the community on December 21^st, 2012—a date that coincided with the end of the 13^th b’ak’tun and the beginning of the 14^th. A fitting beginning for the Mayan-Spanish translation system.

I mentioned what an honor it is in a Microsoft Research Connections blog to work with local communities to create new translation models. What is special about the Microsoft Translator Hub is that it enables this capability “at home” by putting the power of developing a translation system into the hands of the organizations that care about it the most—the communities themselves.

An organization’s small data can be combined with our big data for the major languages to aid in the training of a new system—keeping it in use for coming generations or as the Mayans say, b’ak’tun. This is incredibly important to culture and language preservation as Carlos Allende, Public Sector Director Microsoft México explains, “The Microsoft Translator Hub is Microsoft’s contribution to worldwide cultures. In Mexico we are proud that this incredible technology is displayed for celebrating the Mayan Katun for keeping this language alive and allowing the next generation to have access to this millenarian knowledge.”

It takes a great deal of effort to build a translation model between two languages. One of the features of the Microsoft Translator Hub is that one can do this directly—create a translation model between two languages without having to go through a “pivot” language (usually English). And this is what the local university, Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, has set out to do; to translate from Mayan to Spanish and vice versa.

The process began in May of this year when the Rector of the University, Professor Francisco Rosado-May, met with us at the LATAM Faculty Summit held in Cancun to discuss how it might be possible for his institution to work on Yucatec, a local Mayan dialect, as well as other related languages.

“The Translator Hub by Microsoft is not only a powerful software that facilitates the proper communication between Maya and Spanish but it is also a very important tool to achieve one of the strategic goals of our university: to preserve and increase the use of Maya,” said Professor Rosado-May who went on to explain the significance of language preservation, “Language is the genetic code of any culture, by understanding and using a lot more Maya, we also understand better the mental processes that trigger the construction of knowledge. In the case of Maya, that means understanding how they created sophisticated knowledge such as the zero, astronomy, mathematics, etc. This is why my University and I appreciate so much what Microsoft is doing with the Translator Hub.”

What is being unveiled today is a result of the hard work of linguistics professor, Martin Equival-Pat, his students, local language experts and the support of the local government agencies and Microsoft Mexico. Through their work the university has been able to build a Spanish to Yucatec and Yucatec to Spanish translation system that is just the beginning. As Rosado-May goes on to elaborate, “I expect that the hub will play an important role for the years to come in positioning the Maya language in the global world. We might be witnessing something special for the Baktuns ahead of us and contributing to one of the most important dreams all over the world: live in peace by understanding each other better, and recognizing that different cultures and different languages are important for peace.”

Microsoft Mexico fully supports this project and is comitted to the Mayan society. As Juan Alberto González Esparza, General Director Microsoft México explains, “Think for a moment of a situation where a Spanish speaker and a Maya person communicate with one another in their own languages using a computer or a phone. This is the world that Microsoft has imagined and now this is a reality thanks the Microsoft Translator HUB-Maya; that brings to the new age the Mayan language with all its culture, meanings, stories and lifestyle that will be preserved and available to everyone worldwide. This is the way we are generating a real impact in vulnerable communities connecting people with the potential of our technology.”

As we entered into the 14^th b’ak’tun on December 22^nd energized and engaged; the possibilities for the impact of the Hub and the impact of language preservation throughout the world are limitless.

– Kristin Tolle
Director, Natural User Interactions Team
Microsoft Research Connections

The post Ready to Reenergize: Community Unveiling of the Custom Mayan to Spanish Translation System appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Microsoft Translator offers great tools for web developers. With the Microsoft Translator Widget you can add translation to all of the content of your site, giving the user control over what language they read your site in.

With the Microsoft Translator API you can get access to our service allowing you to translate any user generated or other text. In this walkthrough you’ll learn how to use both of these, adding a widget to the master page of an ASP.NET site, as well as how to sign up for the translator API and use it in your ASP.NET code.

The walkthrough takes you through everything you need to know, including where and how to get the free Visual Studio tools for web developers, signing up for the API, generating a widget and writing the code that you need to access the API.  

You can read the complete walk through here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/translation/p/webapptranslator.aspx

The post Building an ASP.NET Web App with the Microsoft Translator Widget and API appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

In the latest in our series of walkthroughs, we step you through everything you need to do to build a simple translation app that takes your text and translates it into a variety of different languages using the free Microsoft Translator APIs. It then uses the native speech synthesis in Windows 8 to ‘read out’ the translation with the correct pronunciation.

The walkthrough takes you from soup to nuts in signing up for the free service, getting your credentials, installing and configuring the tools, designing, developing and testing your application.

Check it out at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/translation/p/windowsphone8.aspx

The full source code for the app is available here:

http://translator.blob.core.windows.net/msdnwalkthroughs/Transl8.zip

Screenshot:

The post Discover How to Build a Windows Phone 8 App with Microsoft Translator and Speech Synthesis appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Getting Started Guides and Assets:

• Microsoft Translator API Getting Started Guide: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/translation/p/gettingstarted1.aspx
• Windows 8 App Walkthrough: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/translation/p/windows8walkthrough.aspx
• Windows 8 Twitter App Assets: http://translator.blob.core.windows.net/msdnwalkthroughs/TwitterView.zip

Build a Twitter App with Translations

Want to know what people are saying about the latest product release or global news event across the world in 40+ languages? The Twitter app allows you to search for tweets that match a search term, and when those tweets are in a non-English language, it will translate them for you directly over the top of the existing text. We’ve also made the full code for the application available for you to download. The links above with provide you with the walkthroughs and assets to get started. 

View of Twitter App with Translations:

Close-up of one of the tweets, showing the translation:

The post Building Windows 8 Store Apps Using Microsoft Translator appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.