{"id":7011,"date":"2013-05-14T12:07:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T20:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/translation\/2013\/05\/14\/announcing-klingon-for-bing-translator\/"},"modified":"2013-05-14T12:07:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T20:07:00","slug":"announcing-klingon-for-bing-translator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https://www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/translator/blog\/2013\/05\/14\/announcing-klingon-for-bing-translator\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing Klingon for Bing Translator"},"content":{"rendered":"
There have been several firsts since the time we launched this blog: the unique bi-lingual viewer<\/a> for webpage translation, powerful collaboration<\/a> & customization<\/a> technologies, the\u00a0 augmented reality translation within the Translator app<\/a>, which even works when offline, the machine translation system trained for first response in Haiti<\/a> (built in 5 days<\/a>) and the first deeply community partnered<\/a> supported language (Hmong). Today we can confirm what you might already have heard of the Klingon Empire <\/a>\u2013 the availability of the first Klingon machine translation system.<\/a><\/p>\n Klingon*<\/sup> is now a supported option on the Bing Translator<\/a> site, allowing you to translate text snippets and web pages to and from Klingon. \u00a0Bing Translator for Windows Phone<\/a> added Klingon as a supported language, for text mode input\/output and camera mode output. On the Bing Translator<\/a> site, you can also choose to translate to both Latin-script Klingon and to plqaD (the Klingon script). Please note that if you are translating from Klingon, you would need to explicitly select the language (rather than rely on Auto-detect).<\/p>\n This system has been built as a labor of love, in close partnership with members of the Klingon Language Institute<\/a> (KLI) headed by Dr.Lawrence Schoen, Prof. Marc Okrand<\/a>, the inventor of the Klingon language, many other Klingon enthusiasts inside and outside Microsoft. We received fantastic support from our fellow Star Trek fans at Paramount and CBS.<\/p>\n Building a new translation system from scratch is a challenging affair, requiring a large amount of training documents, many iterations of training the engine, reviewing and evaluating, and repeating this many times. <\/a>What you initially get is mostly unintelligible, and with continued learning comes the improvement \u2013 both in vocabulary and in fluency. While there is a great amount of training material for such a system in mainstream languages like English, French or German, Klingon is a language that does not (yet!) have a comparable volume of \u201cparallel\u201d (translated) text, or even material in Klingon alone. Our friends in the community were able to help us gather what is available, and used the Microsoft Translator Hub<\/a> to train the initial engine. Members of the community were then able to review, critique and correct the translation errors this infant system was making. These corrections directly influenced the next training run, and thus the system has been getting better every day. Given its infancy, and the distance it has yet to travel to achieve the necessary fluency and vocabulary \u2013 Klingon will stay as an experimental language in Bing Translator for the time being.<\/p>\n We wish to thank the Klingon language community, Prof.Okrand, Dr.Schoen and CBS\/Paramount for helping make this a reality. If you are a Klingon speaker and wish to join the Hub community built around this effort, please email lawrence@kli.org<\/a> or translator@microsoft.com<\/a>. Not everyone can have Lieutenant Uhura translate for them, so we hope Bing Translator\u2019s Klingon support comes handy next time you are in a pinch.<\/p>\n lupDujHomwIj lubuy’moH gharghmey<\/p>\n – Vikram Dendi & the Translator team at Microsoft<\/p>\n