MICROSOFT QUIETLY ADDS TRANSLATOR WEB SITE TO LIVE OFFERINGS
Appscout, NY
Monday September 10, 2007
Microsoft appears to have quietly expanded its suite of Live services
with the addition of a language translation application.
Industrious bloggers playing around with a variety of URLs this weekend
found that three Web addresses now link to a site for Windows Live
Translator Beta.
Users who land at translator.live.com, translate.live.com or
windowslivetranslator.com can copy and paste text into one window and
have it translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, Russian, Dutch, Arabic or Portuguese.
Microsoft has not yet responded to our inquiries about the app, so
no word on whether Translator will be rolled into Microsoft’s new
unified installer offering. That feature, which was announced last
week, enables one-stop downloads of Windows Live Gallery, Windows
Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Writer.
Translator is reportedly powered by Systran, which also does work
on a similar offering from Google, dubbed Google Translate, which
currently supports English, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. Systran also
did not respond in time.
The Microsoft beta launch comes a week after Google launched a
Web-based, volunteer language translation program.
Approved volunteers are given a list of products to translated,
including main Google sites like Gmail, iGoogle and Google Maps,
according to a Google blog post. It typically takes a volunteer "weeks"
to finish translating one site, but Google has thus far finished
translating 95 percent of the Armenian, Estonian and Slovenian content,
and Latin is 70 percent complete, according to Google.
The search engine giant has had difficulty locating translators for
Abhazian,Tibetan, Inupak, Inuktikut, Wolof and Zhuang, Google said. The
service has added additional languages recently, however, including
Navajo, Filipino, several Russian Federation and African languages.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
