14 DAY TRIAL // Less than a week since it first introduced support for Haitian Creole in Bing Translator, Microsoft has unveiled the first updates designed to provide translation into the official language in Haiti, in addition to French. In the last week of January 2010, when it made available the Haitian Creole statistical machine translation engine, Microsoft asserted that it would work to better the translation capabilities, promising updates would follow soon. Vikram Dendi, senior product manager, Microsoft Translator, revealed on January 30th that Microsoft had rolled out two refreshes to the system.
According to Dendi, Bing Translator and the underlying Microsoft Translator technology now benefit from “more training data = better translations. We trained the system on even more training data (including data that we hand translated) which should reflect in better translations. We are nowhere near done yet, and we will continue to work on this.”
Microsoft has also updated the AJAX API and widget. Dendi explained that both the Microsoft Translator widget and the AJAX API, on which it was based, was currently capable of indicating “Haitian Creole” for the language that had been chosen in their UI. Website developers can access the Microsoft Translator widget and the AJAX application programming interface completely free of charge. The resources are designed so that devs can have pages of web-based projects translated into any supported language, including Haitian Creole. The fix introduced resolved an issue associated with the user interface, Microsoft underlined, as there were no problems with the Haitian Creole translation.
“Please don’t forget the broad set of APIs and webmaster resources that are available for those that are building applications and websites to help with the relief efforts. There are several efforts underway to develop mobile apps (using the SOAP or HTTP API) and websites (using the AJAX API). If you are working on something along those lines, leave a link to your app/site in the comments and I will make sure to surface them up here so people can find them more easily,” Dendi added. “We will continue to work on improving the system and we wish to thank everyone in the community that has been instrumental in helping us get this much requested translation engine out of the door.”