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Microsoft has launched Windows Live Translator, a free service for automatic translation (currently in beta). You can translate text from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and visa versa in some cases! You can either have a text of up to 500 words translated or you can translate an entire web page.
Microsoft is using Systran, the leading supplier of language translation software to be used for home and home office, small businesses and enterprise solutions. Multilingual information is instantly translated and understood and communicated more effectively in multiple languages.
In addition to Systran, Microsoft offers another option for the translation of computer-related texts using a machine translation system developed in-house. It's used internally for some time already to support the translation of their Knowledge Base and other technical documentation, including MSDN Library.
This translation tool by Microsoft is soon to be integrated into Live Search, a feature that already exists with other search engines. The interface looks pretty impressive! Windows Live Translator appears with the original page and the translation side by side in two vertical frames. This is a great help when you're looking for the specific translation of a sentence or are trying to learn a foreign language. Interesting features include the fact that selecting a particular sentence in one frame will do the same for its translation in the adjacent frame. Whatever action you perform in one frame shall be mirrored in the other.
While machine translation is extremely useful, it still has not been developed enough to replace human translation. It works well to provide you with a gist of the entire foreign language text. It isn't completely reliable for a thoroughly correct translation as it doesn't always produce coherent phrases. Since, the tool is not equipped to comprehend the subtleties of language, do not use it to translate poetry or to send important emails.
The Microsoft translation tool isn't the first of its kind. AltaVista (now owned by Yahoo) has had the Babel Fish translation service since the late nineties. Google has a similar service, Google Translate , although they've built their own software to handle some of the translations. It is about time MSN had a translation service! Hopefully, Windows Live Translator beta is just the start and Microsoft will add something new to the web translation classic.
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