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.

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.

Microsoft Translator Widget:

• Manage Translators: The popular Microsoft Translator widget, which has been used by thousands of websites to instantly deliver translated pages to their visitors, is receiving a major update. The collaborative translations feature that we released as a technology preview last year is now complete, and adds a user and role management system that enables site owners to collaborate with their visitors, trusted translators and moderators to tailor the translations to their content. The sometimes less than perfect quality of the Machine Translation system is no longer preventing you from delivering your site in high quality to a worldwide audience!
   

• Manage Translations: Now that you can invite experts, your friends or your users to help tailor the translations for your site, how do you manage all these edits that are flowing in? How to make sure you can weed out edits that might not really be relevant for your content? What about languages that you don’t know? Delivered in this release is also a dashboard to moderate and approve translation edits in bulk. The site owner and the invited users can utilize the dashboard to approve, moderate or hide alternative translations in bulk.
  

• See sentences with pending suggestions: In addition to using the bulk editing feature, you can also simply browser the pages and see which translations have pending suggestions. The widget will highlight for you what you need to look at and approve or reject. A blue highlight is for the translation suggestions, a red highlight is for the pending rejections.
  
• Fresh new design: A fresh new design for the Collaborative Translation functionality. Based on feedback from beta users, and taking into account usability considerations we refreshed and streamlined the user experience of showing/editing alternative translations. This should make it easier for users to immediately get some information about how the community is using the alternatives, select their favorite alternative or provide a new alternative.
  

Microsoft Translator API:

I wanted also to reiterate that our API is not going away, and we continue to be focused on adding value to our partners through continued improvements. In this release we have made several improvements based on your feedback. We are very pleased to see the many applications and scenarios that are being built using the API, and we hope to showcase more of them on this blog. If you would like your application showcased, contact us at mtcont@microsoft.com. If you would like to use the API for production purposes, just send an email to mtlic@microsoft.com to receive the free use commercial license agreement. As you can imagine, we are seeing a significant increase in these requests so we greatly appreciate your patience in waiting for a response.

• Full access to the edits from your community: We promised to give you access to the alternative translations that have been generated as you worked with your community to tailor the translations to your site or scenario. We are pleased to add this functionality to the Microsoft Translator API. It is beta, so please be gentle.  
• More flexibility around API traffic limits: We are removing the fixed limit on the number of requests per minute that you could push to the service. We are replacing it with a more flexible mechanism that we will outline in an upcoming blog post.

There you have it. Some of the awesome new features in this release. For those of you who have been patiently waiting for invitations to try out the collaborative features of the widget, you should start seeing these invitations arrive in batches starting now.

Stay tuned for more detailed information on each of these features and more!

Vikram Dendi
Group Product Manager
Microsoft Translator

The post Announcement: New Microsoft Translator release delivers community tools to customize translations and API enhancements appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

A data center move, several significant user experience related performance improvements, a more scalable service infrastructure and a bunch of bug fixing later here we are with product offerings that are more performant than ever before. You may not be able to notice all the improvements, but a sampling:

Webpage Translator (Bilingual Viewer): The most visible change is the default “view” – the “translation-with-hover-original” is now the view you are presented with if you are a first time visitor. This is a change that is geared towards the most common usage scenario of the bilingual viewer where our users are looking to seamlessly translate and browse various web pages. The side-by-side view is still available just a click away, and we remember your preference of view once you switch from the default. We certainly have quite a few users who love the side-by-side view especially when using wider screens or learning a new language. You can learn more about the bilingual viewer in this blog post. Along with this change, we have been able to improve the load time, the translation time and reliability of translations on long pages. There was also a significant speed increase in English to Chinese (simplified) translation performance. Try it now!

Office: Those of you using the translation functionality in Office will also benefit from the performance related improvements. For those that haven’t tried it yet, you can right click on a selection within Office products and select “Translate” to have the text be translated instantly. In Office 2010, you should be able to do this without any configuration. You can check out the manual setup instructions for Office 2003 and Office 2007 in case you are unable to see Microsoft Translator powered translations in your Office install.

SSL (HTTPS) support:  You are now able to securely send text to the translation service when using the API. We have also enabled the Widget to work seamlessly on SSL protected pages (without any security warnings). This has been a frequently requested feature from many of our users and we are glad to bring it to you in this release. Those of you who already generated widget snippets for your sites, should be able to get the HTTPS enabled widget by regenerating the snippet from the widget adoption portal. On the topic of the widget, the widget again works with Norwegian now.

Text to Speech: We have added Asian language support to our Text to Speech API and user focused features. You can now “Translate-and-Speak” in Korean, Japanese and Chinese! To try it, translate something to any of the languages that we support TTS in (Chinese , Korean and Japanese in addition to English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian) and you should see a speaker icon above the translation.

We took the all the great feedback that our users gave on the Collaborative Translations functionality (thank you for that!) and have made a number of improvements in both the user experience and how we handle input. Finally, many of you noticed that the dictionary functionality was turned off for a little while – now it is back!

We hope you enjoy all the improvements and new additions. Post your feedback or questions on our developer and user forums.

The post Say hello to performance & security appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Welcome to the next wave of innovation – Collaborative Translations.

Microsoft is pleased to announce, the availability of the Collaborative Translations Framework – a technology that combines the scale and speed of automatic machine translation with the accuracy and context awareness of human translation. At MIX 2010, we are announcing the latest version of our translation API (v2).  In addition to bringing real-time, in-place translations to your website, the Microsoft Translator web page widget v2 adds collaborative features that help tailor the translations delivered to fit your site.

In addition to the collaborative features powered by the Collaborative Translations Framework, the V2 of the Microsoft Translator API includes a “batch” interface to translate large amounts of data, support for communicating with the service securely via SSL and the addition of “Translate-and-Speak” – a text-to-speech functionality. We are also adding an enhancement to our Bing Translator user site, where you can use the “Translate-and-Speak” functionality whenever you translate into one of the supported languages.

What is being announced today:

1) A broad set of powerful translation APIs in SOAP, HTTP and AJAX flavors so that developers can pick the best one to fit their requirement. Functionality includes language detection, single and batch translation, collaborative translations and text to speech. All you need to get started is a Bing Developer AppID. In addition, we are also announcing the Microsoft Translator Silverlight control for translation will be available as part of the Silverlight toolkit.

2) An update to Bing Translator translation service, which adds the “Translate-and-Speak” functionality for a set of languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian). Perform a translation on the site and you will notice a speaker icon to click on to hear it spoken.

Who is it for:

The APIs are for anyone that would like to bring translations to their app or site. Some developers have used the APIs to deliver applications that can deal with content in multiple languages, and others have used them to localize their applications. Designers have used them to make sure their designs work in many locales, and enterprises have used them to translate documents. Phone application developers might find the cloud text-to-speech API particularly interesting, as they develop hands-free scenarios.

What does it cost:

The APIs are available at no cost to developers and partners. For high volume commercial use, email mtlic@microsoft.com.

How many languages do you support? When can you add support for <insert language here>?

We continually work on adding new languages – since the last MIX we added 17 new languages bringing us to 30. Here is the list of languages we currently support:

You can always find the latest list of languages here.

The post Collaborative Translations: Announcing the next version of Microsoft Translator technology – V2 APIs appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.