Development Archives - Microsoft Translator Blog

Multilingual App Toolkit 3.1 Launched – Localize Your App, Extend Your Reach

Microsoft Translator — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:50:00 +0000

Today, the Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT) team announced the release of MAT 3.1. The Multilingual App Toolkit integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio to provide Windows Store apps and Windows Phone apps with translation support powered, translation file management, and editor tools powered by Microsoft Translator.

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

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Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress Enables Webmasters and Developers to Localize Site Content

Microsoft Translator — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 03:01:00 +0000

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. has released a new Bing Translator plugin that lets you apply the power of Bing Translator to any WordPress site running version 3.8 or later.

Using the plugin, visitors can translate a site into any of the 40+ supported languages in one click without leaving the page once this light-weight, cross-browser plugin is installed. This plugin also provides options for a setting a color scheme, as well as an option to allow visitors to suggest translations.

The Bing Translator plugin should be installed from within the WordPress Dashboard by clicking on Plugins >Add New and search for “Bing Translator” and works on any WordPress site. A site developer can also manually install the plugin by downloading it from WordPress.org, then adding the “bing-translator” folder in the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory.

Using Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress Video

Celebrating International Mother Language Day with the Launch of Welsh & New Features

Microsoft Translator — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 07:40:00 +0000

Today Microsoft celebrates International Mother Language Day (IMLD) alongside UNESCO, with the goal to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism across the world.

Advancements in technology to support and preserve languages create greater awareness of the linguistic and cultural traditions celebrated throughout the world, which in turn promote understanding, tolerance and dialogue. Helping to enable business, communities, and consumers to communicate and collaborate across language barriers through technology innovation is a core focus for the Microsoft Translator team.

As part of that focus, Microsoft Translator is announcing Welsh as a new supported language in partnership with the National Assembly for Wales and leveraging the Microsoft Translator Hub. The Welsh language today becomes the latest to join a growing list of languages to benefit from translation services provided by Microsoft Translator.

In 2012, the National Assembly passed the Official Language Act into law, which placed a statutory duty on the Assembly Commission to treat both languages on the basis of equality.

The Assembly’s Presiding Officer, Dame Rosemary Butler, said: “One of my key roles is to ensure that all the people of Wales are able to engage with the Assembly’s work, whether through the Welsh or English language. That’s why we have been working with Microsoft to create an automatic language translation system to help the Assembly to meet our own language goals.”

Machine translation is a key part of the Assembly’s commitment to delivering a fully bilingual institution where businesses and services can be delivered through the Welsh and English languages. Users can now translate to and from Welsh using the breadth of Microsoft products including: Office, Bing Translator as well as in the Bing Translator applications for Windows Phone and Windows.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeHcZEd7VEo]

In addition to backend service updates to the Microsoft Translator API, new updates have been released for Windows and Windows Phone Translator apps which include:

Offline Language Packs for Polish and Turkish
Availability of Polish, Czech, Turkish, Greek and Hungarian in Camera Mode
Addition of Welsh and Maltese in Keyboard Mode
Release of Wide Tile for Windows Phone

To further commemorate IMLD, the Microsoft Local Language Program, a part of Microsoft YouthSpark, announced the Language Toolbox, an additional resource to the Microsoft Language Portal (LLP), serving as a consolidated inventory of free language resources and tools provided by Microsoft to help bridge the gap between language and technology. You can read more about this new resource here.

At Microsoft, we are excited that the continued advancements of machine translation features and functionality are enabling users to achieve a shared understanding and make the world a little smaller every day.

To Learn More

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Announcing Today at BUILD – Bing Translator Control for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1

Microsoft Translator — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Today at BUILD, Microsoft announced the preview of the Bing Translator Control for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Developers can download the control immediately from the newly launched Bing Dev Center.

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

Get Samples and Documentation

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Celebrating International Mother Language Day with the Launch of New Languages & Features

Microsoft Translator — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:01:00 +0000

Today Microsoft celebrates the International Mother Language Day alongside UNESCO, with the goal to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism across the world. Advancements in technology to support and preserve languages create greater awareness of the linguistic and cultural traditions celebrated throughout the world, which in turn promote understanding, tolerance, and dialogue.

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

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Building an ASP.NET Web App with the Microsoft Translator Widget and API

Microsoft Translator — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:46:00 +0000

Note: The Translator Web Widget was retired on July 31, 2019. Learn how you can translate your website with Microsoft Translator on the Microsoft Translator business site.

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

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Building Windows 8 Store Apps Using Microsoft Translator

Microsoft Translator — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 20:09:00 +0000

The Microsoft Translator API is a hosted API that allows you to add machine translation to your app. It fully supports Windows Store Apps, so if you want to add localization to these apps, doing so is as easy as subscribing to and using the API. We’ve built out step-by-step instructions and assets that demonstrates how to do this this, showing a C#/XAML based app, built for the Windows 8 Store, which uses the MVVM design pattern.

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:

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Top Sites Going Global with Translator API

Microsoft Translator — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:00:00 +0000

The ability to use language and the capacity to translate between languages is one of the characteristics that define us as humans. Over the last decade, world class researchers – both at our own research labs and around the world have been working on the problem of machine translation, the results of which you are able to enjoy today on Bing and in many other Microsoft products.

Last month at the BUILD conference, Satya Nadella, (President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft) announced the global, high volume commercial availability of the Translator API. This was a significant milestone for us, as we had seen a tremendous increase in demand from partners who see it adding great value to their customers and wanted the reliability, performance, and scale of a Microsoft service. It was an added bonus that we were able to deliver this class of service to our partners at a significantly lower price than alternatives. Over the past few months, the diversity and volume of partners using our API has increased rapidly and continues to grow.

A few weeks ago, Facebook rolled out translations powered by our service to many of their major markets across the world. With a user base larger than most countries of the world (barring India and China), and with 75% of the users from outside the US – Facebook is a great example of how the translation API can help partners break down language barriers.

Facebook joins many other partners including Trip Advisor, Harper Collins, Elsevier, Webster, and eBay who are utilizing the translation API in innovative new ways to bring their services and content to new audiences and new languages. We hope to showcase many of these in the coming months on the Translator blog.

Today at Web 2.0, in a session titled “The Future of Big Data & the Global Web” we will be outlining the value that this data-driven service provides to businesses as they look to expand their business and audience globally. We will also provide an inside look at how the service is built, and showcase some of the partners that have utilized the Translator service to great effect.

The Translator API offers instant text translation, language detection functionality, text-to-speech in multiple languages and innovative collaborative translation functionality. It was designed from the ground up for partner use, and thus provides a choice of API interfaces: SOAP, AJAX, HTTP or OData, allowing developers to choose what works best for their scenario. A comprehensive FAQ is available here.

We believe in the idea of “Translation being a utility and not a destination”, and you can join us in supporting that notion by utilizing the API to break down language walls on the web today. Subscribe to the free tier of service to get started. You can always upgrade to a higher level of service if you need to.

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

Also posted to the Bing Search blog.

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Microsoft Translator API now supports OData, pricing details for higher volumes announced

Microsoft Translator — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:45:00 +0000

Microsoft President Satya Nadella announced major new milestones for the Translator API at his BUILD conference keynote today. We would like to provide some additional detail about the announcement here.

The headlines:

Microsoft Translator API available via the Windows Azure Marketplace at various volume levels to meet your needs

Reiterating our support for standards by supporting OData and adding standards based (OAuth) authentication for greater security

Publishing the pricing model for the various subscription tiers to best fit your needs (in addition to the free tier that we currently offer)

Starting today developers can directly sign up for the Microsoft Translator service on the Windows Azure Marketplace at the level of volume they expect to use. Windows Azure Marketplace is the one stop shop for cloud data, apps and services and we are pleased to utilize this platform to deliver the Translator API to developers. Provisioning the Microsoft Translator API through the Marketplace allows us to deliver the service at higher volumes than we previously could offer, along with the facility to upgrade to higher volume on demand. Additionally, the Marketplace provides a world-class ecommerce back-end which enables us to better serve our global Translator partners and grow with demand.

We are also pleased to announce the addition of OData to our already diverse set of interfaces (SOAP, HTTP & AJAX) to the Microsoft Translator service. Once you subscribe to the offer on Azure Marketplace, you can explore the Odata end point by using the Service Explorer. Starting now, developers are also able to use standards based two-leg authentication (OAuth) to secure calls to API (irrespective of the end point they are using). The full details are available in our developer documentation.

In response to the tremendous demand from existing as well as new partners that wish to utilize a reliable, consistently available, and developer friendly service, we are also pleased to announce pricing for higher volume usage today. In addition to a no-cost tier that is designed for low-volume and hobbyist use, you can today subscribe to higher volume tiers at an attractive price point. You can subscribe to tiers ranging from 4M (million) characters a month onwards, priced at US $10 per million characters. As an introductory offer, we are also announcing a 120 day (4 month) promotional free trial on all paid subscriptions for a limited time. We hope this would allow you to use the service and determine the volume level you would need for your scenario. Existing licensees and users of our API are not affected by this announcement and will have plenty of notice to prepare for the eventual transition onto the unified Marketplace based platform. Please refer to the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page for more details.

Nearly five years ago, we first said “hello world” on this blog. Since then, thanks to an ever increasing user base and enthusiastic developer and business partners we have come a long way. As a team of researchers and engineers at Microsoft Research, we continue to strive to deliver value to Microsoft partners and users worldwide by combining research investments with product development. In addition to our the API, we also provide translation experiences through Bing Translator – our consumer focused webpage and text translation site, through Office, Bing Bar, Internet Explorer and much more. Please don’t hesitate to send us your feedback, comments and questions. We have vibrant user and developer communities where you can discuss the service or ask for help. For questions that aren’t answered in the FAQ or the community, you can also email us at mtcont@microsoft.com (for general comments), or at mtlic@microsoft.com (for specific licensing questions). Please direct any press inquires to mtcont@microsoft.com.

We hope to see you soon from the other side of a translation request!

Vikram Dendi
Director of Product Management
Microsoft Translator

Updated (9/22): Clarification added to title that the free tier of service is not going away.

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Announcement: New Microsoft Translator release delivers community tools to customize translations and API enhancements

Microsoft Translator — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:00:00 +0000

I am pleased to announce the release of the latest version of Microsoft Translator, with a focus on user features and user experience. This release brings some major new features, and a slew of improvements based on feedback from you – our users and partners.Here are some of the highlights of this release:

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

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