Microsoft Translator Is Live On Live Search, IE8, Windows Live Toolbar, and Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft has dumped former translation partner Systran from all its products and services and implemented instead exclusively its in-house developed Machine Translation technology. Dubbed Microsoft Translator, and built by Microsoft Research, Systran's replacement is now featured into a variety of the company's software solutions, either desktop- or Cloud-based. In this context, the Redmond giant has made a step forward from using the products offered by Systran and built on top of the open source Linux operating system, alongside its own Machine Translation project, to just Microsoft Translator.

"Now that the Web is more worldwide than ever, the number of non-native English speakers going online has ballooned, and yet online content in English still dominates. For these users, free translation services mean that an entire world of information can now actually be at their fingertips. We're doing something to help them out. Translation now fully powered by the Microsoft Translator technology is available through Live Search, as well as IE8, the Windows Live Toolbar, and even a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger," explained Lane Rau, marketing manager, Microsoft Research Machine Translation team.

The transition from third party technology to Microsoft Translator was signaled by the launch of the Windows Live Messenger translation bot at the start of September. Rau promised that Microsoft was in the process of introducing support for additional language pairs on top of what is available today through the first full implementation of Microsoft Translator.

"All translation pairs on the site (11 English-X, 12 X-English) are powered by Microsoft Research-developed systems. Two transliteration pairs (chscht), courtesy of the Windows International team. For several languages, better language quality. And finally, the release of TBot, a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger. This release is the combination of all the effort that the team has put into machine translation, not only over the past months, but literally over the past years," revealed a member of the Microsoft Research Machine Translation team.