Microsoft has stepped into the territory of automatic translation with Windows Live Translator Beta. The online-based service went live at the end of the past week as an offer equivalent to what the Mountain View delivers with Google Translate. Both Windows Live Translator and Google Translate are at this point in beta stage, but the similarities fail to stop at this. Windows Live Translator was introduced as Microsoft took its Windows Live suite of products and services into the next phase of evolution focused around the unified Windows Live installer.

Windows Live Translator Beta permits users to translate no more than 500 words at a time from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese Simplified and Traditional, Japanese, Russian and Arabic. And in this context, Microsoft and Google rely on the technology provided by Systran, although the two companies also implement their own Machine Translation products. The only aspect of Systran that can hurt Microsoft is that the Machine Translation was developed under Linux, and now it has made its way to Windows Live.

"Machine Translation, or language translation software, is the process by which computer software is used to translate text from one natural language into another. This definition accounts for the grammatical structure of each language and uses rules and assumptions to transfer the grammatical structure of the source language (text to be translated) into the target language (translated text)" reads a message on the Systran website.

Of course that Windows Live Translator Beta as well as Google Translate Beta suffer from the limitations associated with translating morphology, syntax, semantics and various semantic ambiguities from one language to the other. Automated computer based translation simply cannot make up for the subtleties and architectural differences between languages. The Redmond company's own Machine Translation technology is dubbed Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT).

"Recent research in Machine Translation (MT) has focused on data-driven systems. Such systems are self-customizing in the sense that they can learn the translations of terminology and even stylistic phrasing from already translated materials. Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT) system is such a data-driven system, and it has been customized to translate Microsoft technical materials through the automatic processing of hundreds of thousands of sentences from Microsoft product documentation and support articles, together with their corresponding translations. This customization processing can be completed in a single night, and yields an MT system that is capable of producing output on par with systems that have required months of costly human customization," the company revealed in the product's description.