Microsoft Translator Upgraded with New Features and UX

Microsoft’s machine translation technology received an upgrade this week, with the Redmond company announcing that the overall users experience was boosted in tandem with the introduction of new features.

The enhancements cooked into the latest version of Microsoft Translator are intimately connected with the feedback received by the software giant, reveals Vikram Dendi, Group Product Manager Microsoft Translator.

According to Dendi, various offerings related to the company’s machine translation technology were kicked up a notch, including the Microsoft Translator Widget.

Customers that have been leveraging the widget will be able to start benefiting from updated functionality, streamlining collaboration on translations.

“The collaborative translations feature that we released as a technology preview last year is now complete, and adds a user and role management system that enables site owners to collaborate with their visitors, trusted translators and moderators to tailor the translations to their content,” Dendi stated.

But not only can users invite collaborators to translate text, they can also better manage the translations they get from third-parties.

“Delivered in this release is also a dashboard to moderate and approve translation edits in bulk. The site owner and the invited users can utilize the dashboard to approve, moderate or hide alternative translations in bulk,” Dendi added.

New Microsoft Translator features also include pending suggestions highlights as well as a new design for the Collaborative Translation functionality.

The changes allow users to quickly access suggestions for translation work, as well as enjoy a new look and feel of the way in which alternative translations are showed, displayed and edited.

Developers that are leveraging the Microsoft Translator API will also get to experience improvements compared to the older version of the application programming interface. Dendi enumerated the most important:

“• Full access to the edits from your community: We promised to give you access to the alternative translations that have been generated as you worked with your community to tailor the translations to your site or scenario. We are pleased to add this functionality to the Microsoft Translator API. It is beta, so please be gentle.

• More flexibility around API traffic limits: We are removing the fixed limit on the number of requests per minute that you could push to the service.”