AltaVista (now owned by Yahoo) has had the Babel Fish translation service since the late nineties. The service, which is powered by a French company called Systran, takes bits of text and translates it from or into any of twelve languages. Entire web pages can also be translated by entering the URL.
A few blogs today have noted the quiet launch of Windows Live Translator, which appears to be the exact same service as Babel Fish, even down to the Systran software that powers it.
The service appears to be down right now and is returning an error. To their credit, though, they didn’t officially launch the service today, people just noticed that it was live and started to use it.
Google has a similar service, Google Translate, although they’ve built their own software to handle some of the translations.
Even if it is just remaking the wheel… …it’s about time msn had a translation service!
I always use google translate as it’s typically faster (and I have a bookmarklet for one-click translation of any page), but my only complaint with it is that it doesn’t support Dutch. I come across a surprising amount of Dutch pages that I want translated, and for this, I reluctantly open up ye olde babelfish.
You Microsoft launchs Windows Live Translator beta.
They probably never heard of BabelFish before? and competing against something already used widely?
Hmmm
I have to agree with Word Hugger… it is about time msn had a translation service! Hopefully this is just the start and Microsoft will add something new to the web translation classic.
In case anyone is interested, I posted a video review of the translator here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....r-launches
Prior to using their own technology, Google had also licensed SYSTRAN.
“launch of Windows Live Translator, which appears to be the exact same service as Babel Fish, even down to the Systran software that powers it.”
Mike - it’s not the exact same service at all. While it does appear Systran powers it, other than that, it doesn’t look or act like Bfish. Try doing an actual web page translation to see the difference. It’s way ahead of Google and Bfish and if they would fix the issues I noted on CN, it could be very powerful.
I read this story on http://www.pulse2.com am pretty excited about it. I wish it was getting more coverage. I really hope this rallies up some competition between the big 3 and gets us some better translation tools.
Live Fish?
uh, dude, you gotta do some research before you post these comments…google does not provide their own statistical machine translation tools for all languages, only a couple via labs…the two top minds in the field of smt are, oddly enough, both employed by microsoft and google - what does that tell you about the future of search, the future of online advertising and the future of online collaborative applications? exactly…smt is what matters, not these utilities…
When are you going to launch Internet Explorer ( IPTV ) browser ?
Let us know… Otherwise Google might steal it and grab more marketshares. Just like Google brought Youtube.
I want IPTV browser that comes with IE and IPTV. I want to watch people’s broadcast networks other network TV. I want something like Youtube and free browser and free TV.
I can’t wait… For Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Google browser… I want IE IPTV.
Microsoft is slow to update their “Live” offerings…In particular, Windows Live Writer is still in Beta, and it’s been well over a year! Live Writer is an excellent tool too…
MS developed their own translation engine (long before Google started developing theirs), and it’s used internally for some time already to support the translation of their Knowledge Base and other technical documentation.
The Help page also says that computer-related content is translated using their own engine, while other content is translated using Systran. You need to activate a check box if you want to use MS’ own engine.
Google uses Systran as well, it’s just that for some languages (those marked “BETA” in their language translation tools) they use their own statistical machine translation engine.
You can verify this by having the same sentence translated on Google as well as on Windows Live Translator. The output will be the same (as it’s both generated by Systran), unless you use one of the “BETA” languages for Google or click “computer-related content” on live.com.
AltaVista/Babelfish also used Systran, BTW.
“Microsoft Launches Babel Fish, I mean Windows Live Translator”
Was that some kinda’ lame shot at us? We never, ever, never ever copy anyone!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
that’s awesome! my friends in Spain
I waited this! hope Its clever than I think!
really love yahoo! I thinks I have no problem with communicating other languages
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.
wow.. your title is so funny.. not!
Microsoft’s ‘Babel fish’ has more features btw..
Don’t believe any of this stuff!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
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…
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.
Nothing new.. same old crazy Microsoft.. Copying stuff is part of their corporate rule..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.appliedlanguage.com.....quick.aspx
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.
hello
hello
how are u doing i hope u are fine as i am, in Ghana
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://mtbotprototype.spaces.live.com/)