Bing Translator now comes with support for Haitian Creole, also referred to as Creole or Kreyòl, one of the two official languages in Haiti, along with French. Vikram Dendi, senior product manager, Microsoft Translator, notes that Microsoft has worked in order to introduce support for Haitian Creole at the request of the community involved in Haitian relief efforts. In this regard, Microsoft Research unveiled at the end of the past week an experimental machine translation system designed to allow users to translate to and from Haitian Creole.
“This is an experimental system put together in record time. While our typical approach to adding new languages involves significantly larger amounts of training, a higher threshold for quality testing – we decided that the upside warranted making the system available to the community at the earliest, and continue improving it subsequently. We are working diligently to keep improving the quality, but bear with us if you encounter problems. You can always contact us at mtcont at microsoft.com with feedback,” Dendi stated
Machine translation associated with Haitian Creole is available not only in Bing Translator, but also via additional Microsoft Translator technologies, including services and application programming interfaces. An illustrative example in this regard, is the Messenger Translation Bot which can now speak Haitian Creole. All that users need do is add [email protected] to their messenger buddy list in Windows Live messenger and they will be able to talk with Kreyol speakers.
“The Haitian Creole translator is now part of the Microsoft Translator web service enabling many of the user scenarios powered by the service. Users can access the service through the Microsoft Translator web site. Developers would be interested in looking at our APIs – and choose from SOAP or HTTP (Support for Haitian in our AJAX API will be rolled out in the coming days),” Dendi added.
The Microsoft Translator API, the machine translation technology and services from Microsoft, including Bing Translator can be accessed and used completely free of charge. Developers can leverage the application programming interface in order to build apps or integrate translation services into websites with support for Haitian Creole.
“In the coming days expect to see support for Haitian Creole added to even more of our scenarios (Translator widget, Office etc) as well as the AJAX API. Known issues and announcements can also be found on our forums. We hope that this contribution proves useful to the various humanitarian efforts underway, and please stay tuned to this blog for further news on the Haitian Creole language support,” Dendi explained.