Announcing the Next Generation of the Bing Translator Widget – Powering the Tomorrow Project

Microsoft Translator — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:30:00 +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.

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:

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

Using Tbot – the Messenger Bot powered by Microsoft Translator

Microsoft Translator — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:24:00 +0000

Tbot is an automated buddy that provides translations for Windows Live Messenger. It was first launched in 2008 as a prototype pre-dating many other bots and has since become immensely popular. You can have one-on-one conversations with Tbot or invite friends (group conversation) who speak different languages with Tbot translating for you.

Following is a set of frequently asked questions about the bot. If you have any technical questions, please post them in our user forums.

[Q1] How to install/add Tbot in your Messenger?

1. Open your Live Messenger and look for the Add a contact or group icon.

2. Type in mtbot@hotmail.com as your contact. Tbot will now show up as one of your contacts.

[Q2] How to use Tbot commands?

1. Type TBot ? to see all the Tbot commands. You will see the following list of Tbot commands.

2. To see your current translation language setting, type TBot lang. For instance, if you were translating from French to English in your previous session, you will see the following.

(If you’re going to use Tbot for the first time, this is not applicable.)

3. To change your translation language setting, type TBot change. Tbot will first show you the list of source languages (FROM languages) as shown below.

You have to select your source language here!! Otherwise, Tbot won’t understand any commands. In other words, commands such as Tbot ?, Tbot lang, etc. won’t work until you select your source language.

4. Once you select your source language, Tbot will ask you to select your target language (TO language). Please select your target language. Again, if you don’t select your target language here, Tbot won’t let you move on. In other words, commands such as Tbot ?, Tbot set, etc. won’t work until you select your target language.

5. Once the source and the target languages got selected, you’re ready to translate. Start typing any sentences.

Here is a snapshot for TBot translating from English to Japanese.

6. Now if you want to change your language pairs, you can just type TBot change, and do #3 and #4 above.

If you want to list all the TBot commands, you can type TBot ? .

7. How to use TBot set

One of the TBot commands is TBot set. Please note that this is to set up the language for your user interface, not for your translation language(s).

For instance, when you type TBot set, you’ll see the language list as shown below.

If you are a Korean and want to see TBot’s instructions in Korean, you select Korean, so that you can see TBot’s instructions in Korean as shown below.

[Q3] How to talk to someone with Tbot’s help?

Here is an example of how Takako who speaks Japanese is able to talk to Erik, who speaks Portuguese.

(1) Takako invites Erik, and then invites Tbot. You’ll see both Erik and Tbot on your conversation pane as shown below.

(2) Takako set the language pair using the Tbot command, “Tbot change”.

She set the source language to Japanese and the target language to Portuguese.

(3) Takako and Erik can start the conversation using Japanese and Portuguese, respectively.

For instance:

That’s it!

The post Using Tbot – the Messenger Bot powered by Microsoft Translator appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

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Announcing the Next Generation of the Bing Translator Widget – Powering the Tomorrow Project

Using Tbot – the Messenger Bot powered by Microsoft Translator