The introduction of MicrosoftTranslator.com is an integral part of the latest update to Microsoft's translator technology. The Redmond company hasn't scrapped the old Windows Live Translator, but is using both domains in parallel at this time. In fact, the new MicrosoftTranslator.com website has a design identical with what was available on Windows Live Translator, including the Windows Live brand.

Back at the start of September 2008, the software giant transitioned its translation service under the Windows Live brand umbrella to the Microsoft Translator technology, developed inhouse by Microsoft Research. In this context, the new domain is a simple reflection of the evolution of the underlying machine translation technology, and not a re-branding.

A member of the Microsoft Research Machine Translation team discussed “some other updates in this release you may notice: we have officially migrated our domain to www.microsofttranslator.com; improved quality across several language pairs, due to improvements in training data quality; improvements in Japanese to English, due to an improved method of parsing the training data.”

The update is not limited to the new domain and the under-the-hood improvements for existing language pairs. The Redmond company now supports machine translations between English and Russian. All implementations of the translator technology now feature the English to Russian language pair from Live Search to the Windows Live Messenger Tbot.

“While machine translation is certainly never perfect, for this new language pair we have now hit our quality bar for release. How do we determine the quality bar? In general, when the translation can be considered 'useful.' We consistently receive feedback from our users that imperfect translation which is useful is better than no translation. So we have to balance user demand with translation quality. With that in mind, we test our language pairs with human evaluations, until we have reached 'useful' translation,” the MSR-MT team member added.