Bing Translator Evolves with 7 New Languages

The addition of Haitian Creole in the second half of January 2010 was only the precursor for the introduction of no less than seven new languages between the 20+ already supported by Microsoft’s machine translation technology. While the addition of Haitian Creole was done out of critical necessity, as the Redmond company was laboring to support the international relief efforts in Haiti, the new seven languages for which support has been added as of today, March 1st, 2010, are part of the natural evolution of Microsoft Translator/Bing Translator.

“I am happy to announce the addition of seven new languages to our translation service. As always, they will be immediately available for your use through the APIs and all the products that consume the service. Here is the list of languages that have been added in the latest release. In addition there have been several updates to the Haitian Creole language since [January 2010],” explained Vikram Dendi, senior product manager, Microsoft Translator.

The latest languages added are as follows: ROM – Romanian, NOR – Norwegian, HUN – Hungarian, SKY – Slovak, SLO – Slovenian, LTH – Lithuanian, and TRK – Turkish. Dendi has also been hard at work on solving a problem with Bing Translator. With the increase in the number of supported languages, Microsoft Translator is running out of space to display them properly. Of course, this is a problem which, along with the fix, Microsoft is bound to welcome, as it only illustrates the evolution of the machine translation engine developed inhouse.

“We continue to work on adding even more languages to the service, so please keep sending us feedback and stay tuned for other announcements on this blog,” Dendi stated. “With the addition of these new languages, the approach I recommended in the short term is visible in the translation toolbar – the language list uses a smaller font size. In the future, we intend to move to either a multiple column list, or another style of display for the list. I will look forward to more such problems, since it means we are meeting more expectations from you - our users.”