New Microsoft Translation Service Offers Side-By-Side Comparisons
Microsoft has launched a new translation service intended to complement Windows Live Search. Although the automatic translation service is currently on a separate page, it would appear that Microsoft intends to integrate Translator into the main Live Search page at some point. Such a move would bring Live Search up to speed with the other major search players, which already offer some form of translation service.
The engine behind Microsoft’s Translator is Systran, which is also used by Google and Babelfish, however, Microsoft appears to using a newer version of Systran as its translations differ somewhat from those on Google and Babelfish.
At the moment Microsoft Translator is limited to 500 words and a handful of languages. Other options include the ability to translate a URL from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese or Russian.
Beneath both search options is a box to tell Translator whether or not the document is computer related. According to Google Operating System, Microsoft is using an in-house translation engine for computer related texts, reportedly the same system that translates MSDN documents.
While the translations are pretty close to those from Babelfish or Google, Microsoft’s offering differs significantly in how the results are displayed.
Both text and web page translations show the original and translated texts side-by-side and in the case of translated web pages scrolling is synchronized and moving your mouse over either text box will highlight the corresponding sentence in the other box, making it easy to compare the original with the translated text.
As we’ve mentioned when we looked at other services, like those from Google, machine translation has a long way to go in the accuracy realm, but it’s not a bad way to get the overall gist of a document and Windows Live Translator’s side by side comparison features nicely compliment this approach.
