14 DAY TRIAL // A new update introduced to Microsoft’s machine translation technology expanding the number of languages supported to no less than 35. As of the past week, users in Indonesia, Ukraine and Vietnam can perform translations between any of the languages already available in Bing Translator and their native tongues.
This is the larger language support refresh the Redmond company offered this year, after a March 2010 update also designed to allow additional translation options.
“What do Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Indonesian have in common? They all have very passionate communities that have for a while been encouraging our team to add support for these languages,” a member of the Microsoft Translator team stated.
According to the software giant, it was precisely the feedback they received from users in Vietnam, Indonesia and Ukraine that made it embrace the three languages associated with the countries with Bing Translator.
“We are proud to announce that with our latest release, we added these three languages to bring our total number languages to 35,” the company said.
“The Microsoft Translator machine translation system can now deliver translations in the following languages: Arabic, French, Latvian, Swedish, Bulgarian, German, Lithuanian, Thai, Chinese Simplified, Greek, Norwegian, Turkish, Chinese Traditional, Haitian, Creole, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hebrew, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Danish, Hungarian, Romanian, Dutch, Indonesian, Russian, English, Italian, Slovak, Estonian, Japanese, Slovenian, Finnish, Korean and Spanish.
Bing Translator supports both text and web page translation functionality in all the languages mentioned above.
But of course, the capabilities of Microsoft’s machine translation technology go further than this.
Users will be able to not only perform translations online in Bing Translator, but also in the Office productivity suite, via Internet Explorer 8 and IE9, but also in third-party websites that embrace the technology.
“You can also translate text and documents between these languages from within Office. To see these languages in your Office translation language list, you would need to have the LIP (Language Interface Pack) for that language installed,” the software giant said.
“Personally, I am quite excited at being able to follow what my friends are saying in these languages on Facebook and Twitter (by using the visual preview of the Internet Explorer accelerator)!
“Finally, you can also deliver your web pages to your site users using the Microsoft Translator widget. Not only that, with the collaborative translations feature you can tailor the translations to best suit your content.
“You can try it on this blog right now – translate to a different language, hover to see the popup that shows the original sentence and click “More Translations” to edit/select the translation to be delivered.”