14 DAY TRIAL // With the addition of a new feature and fresh translation capabilities, Microsoft has kicked its machine translation technology up a notch. On May 26, a member of the Microsoft Translator team revealed the two changes the software giant introduced to Microsoft Translator, namely any-to-any translation and language autodetect. Microsoft Translation users will now be able to leverage all the language options offered by the service in order to perform more complex translations than before. “It is now possible to translate from any of our languages to any other language. Spanish to Chinese? Arabic to German? Check,” an MT representative said.
In addition to expanding the translation options for users, Microsoft also brought to the table the auto-detect feature. Microsoft Translator now features Auto-Detect as the default selection for the first language selection menu and English for the second.
“We have also added a Language Autodetect feature to our webpage translator. So if you’re on a page that’s in a language you don’t recognize, our translation engine will autodetect the language on the source page, and automatically start translating into the language of your choice. We’ve also cleaned up our landing page to try and make it a bit easier to use,” the Microsoft Translator team member added. The UI redesign of the Microsoft Translator page now also offers users a single box for the translation of both text and websites. The service no longer has a separate field reserved for entering URLs for the websites that need to be translated.
“In addition, some of you noticed that there was a bug for some PC configurations with IE8. There was a bug where the IE8 Accelerator did not remember the user’s selected language. With this release, the bug has been fixed. Thanks to those of you who caught the bug and let us know!! An added bonus: you can also translate from any language to any other language in the preview pane,” the Microsoft Translator team representative added.