A couple of weeks back, Microsoft unveiled Windows Live Translator, the company's very own online translation service. This is the first step that the Redmond company has taken into the free online machine translation field and has done so with the help of the Machine Translation technology from Systran, developed under the open source Linux operating system. Essentially, the new Windows Live service allows users to translate texts up to 500 words from/into English from/into Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Microsoft does not only use Systran technology, but also its own machine translation engine.

"Note that a check box option labeled Computer-related content allows you to get better-adapted translations for (computer-) technical text, provided by Microsoft Research's own statistical machine translation engine. Our innovative approach to web page translation includes a user interface we refer to as the Bilingual Viewer. It offers 4 types of bilingual views from which users may choose depending on their preference or screen size. The side-by-side and top/bottom views offer synchronized scrolling, highlighting, and navigation. We render the translated text progressively on a web page in order to make it more quickly available for the user to read, while other page elements are still being translated in the background," revealed Andrea Jessee, a Senior Program Manager with Microsoft Research Machine Translation Group.

Jessee additionally revealed that following the overhauling of Live Search and the delivery of version 2.0, Microsoft will be able to server "Translate this page" links on webpages served in the results to searches in different languages than the native language of the user. Clicking on such a link will automatically translate the page and open it in the Bilingual Viewer. "Language translation is extremely difficult, as the meaning of words and phrases often depends on the context and specialized knowledge of the domain area or culture. Sentence structures and grammatical rules vary significantly between two languages, adding to the complexity of the translation challenge. Currently, it still requires human skills to translate sentences without errors", Jessee added.