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Microsoft Translator Widget

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This week I stumbled upon the new (and very cool) Microsoft Translator Widget.

Actually, this isn't really new (apparently it has been available for over six months now) but it was certainly new to me.

A colleague of mine on a previous project pointed out the Microsoft Translator site back in March, but somehow I was oblivious to the Translator Widget until just this week. Wow...so many things to keep abreast of these days.

I've added the Translator Widget to my MSDN blog this morning. Interesting tidbit - it required more time to tweak the Community Server CSS rules in order to make room for the 200px minimum width required by the Translator Widget than it did to actually integrate the feature onto my blog.

All you have to do to integrate this feature on your site is:

  1. Enter the URL of your site
  2. Read and agree to the terms of use
  3. Click the Generate Code button
  4. Copy/paste a small amount of HTML into your site

You can read more about the Microsoft Translator Widget on the Translation team's blog if you want more details.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2009
    I'm Thai. The translator from google is still a child for me. It translates word by word. For Thai, the adverb or/and adjective are usually following after verb/noun. It is opposite from english. May MS do better??

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2010
    Is there any way to reduce the width to 150 px? When I change the width, the middle search section still extends to 200 px. I don't think that much space is actually required to see the language names.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2010
    @Archanfel: While I'd like to think that automated translation from one language to another will one day be a flawless process, the reality is that we are a long way from that vision. Eventually, I think we'll get to a point where translating written text -- and perhaps even translating spoken words -- from one language to another via software will be nearly indistinguishable from human translation. However, language translation is a technology that is still in its infancy (at least in my opinion). We've used language translation features similar to the Microsoft Translator on some projects that I've worked on, but we've always ensured people understood the caveat that this was not meant to entirely replace the role of human translation. Rather it should augment the localization effort.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2010
    @David: It looks like the Microsoft Translator currently emits an inline style that specifies the width as 200px. You might consider posting your comment to the Translation team's blog to see if they would consider changing this in the future to make the Microsoft Translator more flexible.