14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has taken its project focused on machine translation one step further. At the end of the past week, the Redmond company announced that the Microsoft Translator service had evolved, with the addition of a new engine. At the same time, the software giant indicated that users of several existing translation engines would be able to take advantage of quality improvements, synonymous with superior translations compared with what had been available thus far.
“We are happy to announce the release of our English <-> Polish translation engine! Some of you have been asking us about Polish translation, and we’re excited to deliver for you! We’ve also made some quality improvements to our Spanish, French, German, and Italian engines – if you’ve tried these languages out in the past, give them another try and let us know what you think,” a member of the Microsoft Research Machine Translation (MSR-MT) team revealed.
At the start of September 2008, Microsoft dropped the third-party machine translation technology that was powering its service, and went instead for solutions developed inhouse by its Research division. November marked another evolution for Microsoft Translator, as the company introduced the Russian-English language pair, but also made quality enhancements across the table. The latest language pair, as well as the improvements for existing engines are yet another example of the company's commitment to growing its machine translation project.
“One more thing I wanted to mention – we try out various features from time to time, as part of our commitment to offer new ways for our users to take advantage of translation. You might notice that the link to get a professional translation has been taken down as part of our current release. We launched this service back in June 2008. This experimental feature has run its course (for now), and we are evaluating the experience to see how we could make it better,” the MSR-MT team representative added.