Microsoft Launches Online Translation Service

Over the years, there have been few worthwhile online language-translation tools, namely because all of them offer foolish results. One I have relied on for a while though, has been Babelfish, which was actually one of the first such tools on the web. Microsoft, not being one to remain quiet in any category of web-service, recently launched their own translation service, “Windows Live Translator (Beta!)”.

According to Mashable, the tool makes use of Systran, a world-leading translation service that offers both live and automated translation. It’s a solid offering, but shouldn’t be used in any scenario of importance. “Techgage kicks serious butt.” translated to German comes out as, “Techgage tritt ernsten Kolben.”. Translated back to English comes out as, “Techgage steps serous pistons.”, which is so flattering, it might just become our new motto.

As far as the actual quality of the translation goes, Microsoft uses Systran’s well known engine (Google is also using it), but also offers the option of using their own in-house machine translation service which works well with computer-related texts. It’s hard to objectively test how good Microsoft’s translator really is, but based on a couple of paragraph of text I’ve fed it, I wasn’t impressed enough to declare it much (or any) better than Google’s translation service.

Source: Mashable