On Demand Translation

My blog has been available to Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese as well as English readers for several years. The blog entries are translated by volunteers who speak the language. While this results in high quality translations, sometimes it can take a few days to translate a blog post, and we can’t translate into the many languages our customers speak.

To offer more languages and faster translations, my blog now offers machine translations into many more languages via Microsoft Translator. The translator, which you can see on the right bar of this page, is used by the Bing Translator and the Translate feature in Internet Explorer. The Translator will translate blog entries into any of the offered languages on demand, with no lag time between the availability of the English version and the availability of translated versions.

For those languages that are human translated today, a human translator will continue to translate the entry at the earliest possible time. For Spanish readers, the Spanish human translation will replace the entry offered by the Translator. Japanese and Simplified Chinese readers will continue to have links to the human translated versions available as before.

You can improve the machine translations by editing the translation in place. The Translator widget allows you to hover over the translated content and see the original English sentence in context as well as suggest a new translation or pick from any of the suggested ones. In addition to making the translations more appropriate for the content, correcting the translation helps the translator improve because the more people suggest alternatives or vote for already-submitted translations, the more the system gains confidence in the translation.

I’m pleased to be able to reach more readers in more languages through the Translator technology, and in turn, as more blogs use this technology, translations improve over time as users suggest better translations. If you have comments about Microsoft Translator, visit the Microsoft Translator team’s forum.

Namaste!