Comments on: Microsoft Launches Babel Fish, I mean Windows Live Translator

By: Technogeekanerd » Blog Archive » The Geekinator Podcast Episode #0016

Technogeekanerd » Blog Archive » The Geekinator Podcast Episode #0016 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:29:22 +0000

[...] Microsoft Launches Babel Fish, I mean Windows Live Translator [...]

By: http://www.aquariumbuffs.info

http://www.aquariumbuffs.info — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:11:27 +0000

http://www.aquariumbuffs.info...

It can periodically become exacting to divide the good fish tacos facts from the imperfect….

By: Late reply...

Late reply... — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:11:26 +0000

Not sure if anyone is going to find this useful, but I read some bloggers asking for MT features to be added to Messenger. Well, I’m a member of the MT team at MSFT, and I have a PRIVATE (meaning not a company product/iniciative) prototype avaliable if anyone wants to try – just add mtbot-en_us@hotmail.com to your Messenger contact list and say “Hello” to the bot. Some basic instructions are also available in the blog (http://mtbotpro...paces.live.com/)

By: emmanuel

emmanuel — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 11:07:18 +0000

hello
how are u doing i hope u are fine as i am, in Ghana

By: emmanuel

emmanuel — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 11:06:05 +0000

hello

By: David

David — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:39:54 +0000

barabum mentioned Language Weaver and http://www.kontrib.com, which I think is an excellent showcase for SMT. If Michael is interested in cutting edge translation technology, he should review kontrib.com.

By: Халкидики

Халкидики — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:10:11 +0000

[...] сред най-важните неща за тези 10 дни – Microsoft пуснали преводач на Live.com, a Matt Cutts пише че Google Reader се е [...]

By: Richard Michie

Richard Michie — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 08:32:45 +0000

My site offers the same Sytran system but with the benefit that you can add free machine translation to your own site with a piece of HTML code. You can down load it at http://www.appl...free_quick.aspx

By: Jason Adams

Jason Adams — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:16:48 +0000

Stephane: Sorry if what I said was in any way construed to be an ad for Systran, a company whose product I have a high level of distaste for. MT in general performs poorly and Systran is especially bad. What they do well is sell themselves, and they have a large number of supported language pairs. I’m not sure what the “attention grab from microsoft” is referring to if that was still intended for me. My intent was simply to say that Systran is used by a lot of people, so Microsoft wasn’t doing anything unusual in using them as well.

Also, I was incorrect about freetranslation.com (thanks to Oli for pointing that out). They use their own MT engine and not Systran.

By: Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:41:06 +0000

Hey – I made some corrections to the post regarding Google. I don’t see the extra functionality on the MS site that some of you are referring to, but please point it out and I’ll make additional changes. The Apple zealot comment was a little random since they aren’t mentioned in the post.

By: Frank Cefalu

Frank Cefalu — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:09:37 +0000

Wow Mike,

You became a Apple Zealot over night. Next time do a correct comparison of the apps. I share many of the opinions of the posters above me. I can’t believe you posted this crap.

By: Leaving The Day Job

Leaving The Day Job — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:07:20 +0000

The amazing thing about all these machine translation tools is how uniformly poor they are.

For example, this is the lead article from Le Monde translated into English by MSN : “Special diets of retirement: the trade unions threaten of a conflict
The Socialist party, attentive with the method, asks that the “negotiation be the rule”. Olivier Besancenot qualifies the remarks of the Prime Minister on the special diets of retirement of “declaration of war”. ”

Looks like we’ve got a long, long way to go in this field.

By: Stephane Rodriguez

Stephane Rodriguez — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:20:05 +0000

Jason Adams said “Systran has been the leader in commercial MT for about as long as it has been around, so it’s no surprise that it’s powering Microsoft’s offering, just like everyone else’s. (…)”

Talk about an ad for Systran.

A general text translation produces absolute nonsense. Systran, an old company, has done a lot of work in specific domains or categories of text translation. None of that work is used in this service however, it seems.

So Microsoft using Systran does not mean what Systran does best, at all.

This is just typical attention grab from Microsoft.

By: Avatar

Avatar — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 05:41:50 +0000

Mike,if you could please do some corrections:

1.-google also uses systrain in most of their service
2.-as many noted here, the service view configurations and interface are a big step forward and you should have noted that, there are 4 view configurations and a fifth if you can figure out how to get it.
3.-as other also noted, comparing its performance and behaviour to babelfish is way off.

And it has been active for almost a month,there no links to it and that is why it took for someone looking for it by name to find it out.. and there are actually 4 other live services in stealth mode.. but i doubt any here will be able to guess the codenames.

By: TechCabin

TechCabin — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 04:47:24 +0000

Windows Live 번역기 베타 서비스 시작…

Windows Live 번역기 베타 서비스가 공개되었다. Altavista의 변역 서비스 엔진을 제공했던 Systran과 합작하여 만든 이 서비스는 현재 4가지 주소로 접속이 가능하다.

translator.live.com
translate.live.com
wi…

By: Fabian Schonholz

Fabian Schonholz — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 04:04:40 +0000

I used to use BF for kicks. I liked it, specially translating from foul expressions between English, French and Spanish (languages I speak fluently or used to be fluent on it.) It was fun playing.

By: aMmadz

aMmadz — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:50:13 +0000

Nothing new.. same old crazy Microsoft.. Copying stuff is part of their corporate rule..

By: Jason Adams

Jason Adams — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:47:57 +0000

Systran has been the leader in commercial MT for about as long as it has been around, so it’s no surprise that it’s powering Microsoft’s offering, just like everyone else’s. This is pretty standard for online translation services like freetranslation.com and a host of others. Systran uses a rule-based system, which has been tweaked for so many years that it’s hard for a new statistical system to catch up. Another advantage to Systran is the large number of language pairs they have systems already built for. Building new SMT systems will take Google and Microsoft years.

By: StartuPlay - China Internet Marketing (Your SEO/SEM Personal Guide)

StartuPlay - China Internet Marketing (Your SEO/SEM Personal Guide) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:47:05 +0000

Windows Live Launched Chinese to English Website Translation…

Microsoft delivers online translation system
In a move designed to keep up the pace with Google, Microsoft is now providing online translation software in over eight languages. The Windows Live Translator beta system can be found on http://translator.l…

By: Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:28:05 +0000

The translation is basically identical to any of the other guys (Google/Babel) BUT the interface once you’ve translated any content on Live Translator is a big step forward. The Side-by-side review or either of the hover-modes are like nothing any of the other guys offer up.

While not ground breaking this is a respectable step forward from an Interface POV…

By: steve ballmer

steve ballmer — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:21:08 +0000

Don’t believe any of this stuff!

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

By: Dev

Dev — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:19:34 +0000

wow.. your title is so funny.. not!
Microsoft’s ‘Babel fish’ has more features btw..

By: 1 Dot Release: Mircosoft Live Translator

1 Dot Release: Mircosoft Live Translator — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 01:57:50 +0000

[...] [via: Microsoft Launches Babel Fish, I mean Windows Live Translator] advertising [...]

By: barabum

barabum — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 01:51:04 +0000

Any machine translation engine is currently crap (i.e. very annoying, if intelligible) but the only ones with guts to put up the translation to public use (i.e. show the translations) are LanguageWeaver, with their http://www.kontrib.com digg-clone-with-translation. For some reason you cannot use the translation services to translate anything but a public web page.

By: kiarra

kiarra — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 01:18:42 +0000

that’s awesome! my friends in Spain
really love yahoo! I thinks I have no problem with communicating other languages I waited this! hope Its clever than I think!