Office 2003 setup instructions (updated)

Posted on August 11, 2008by Microsoft Translator

Update: Check out the new installer you can download to make this really easy!

Following up on last week’s post on the integration of translation into Office, here are the instructions to set it up in Office 2003, for our users who do not have Office 2007.

1) Open the task pane

First bring up the task pane by selecting “Task Pane” on the View menu (or pressing Ctrl-F1):

2) Select the research pane

In the Task pane drop-down menu (here labeled “Getting Started”), select the “Research” task pane.

3) Go to the Research Options dialog

After you’ve chosen the “Research” task pane, there should be a “Research options” hyperlink at the bottom of the pane. Click on this hyperlink to bring up the task pane.

4) Select the “Add Services” button

5) Enter the URL of the Microsoft Translator Web Service

Here you’ll need to type in the address of the Microsoft Translator Web Service:
http://www.windowslivetranslator.com/officetrans/register.asmx

Then click the “Add” button to continue.

6) Install the Microsoft Translator services

Just click the “Install” button in this dialog.

Note that you can’t check any of the boxes; this is expected behavior. Translation systems, unlike other Research Pane plug-ins, are enabled in a different dialog. The next steps will cover this.

Now click “OK” to close the research options dialog.

7) Select the Translation subpane from the drop down menu

At this point, Word may bring up a dialog saying, “Microsoft Word can’t open the translation feature. This feature is not currently installed. Would you like to install it now?” Click “Yes” to install the feature.

8) Bring up the Translation options dialog

Just below the combo boxes that allow you to select the source and target language, there should be a hyperlink labeled “Translation options..”. Click on it to open the translation options dialog. (Depending on what text you have highlighted and which translation features are installed and enabled on your machine, the Research task pane may look slightly different. That’s OK; just find the “Translation options…” hyperlink.)

9) Windows Live Translator as your translation engine

This is where you specify which translation engines you’d like to use for each language pair. By default Word uses WorldLingo for all language pairs; this is where you can choose Windows Live Translator instead. (Certain Word installations don’t seem to come with WorldLingo pre-installed, so you may not have to change anything here.)

The language pairs currently available from MSR-MT are as follows:

English ? Chinese (Simplified)

English ? French

English ? German

English ? Italian

English ? Japanese

English ? Spanish

English ? Arabic

English ? Chinese (Traditional)

English ? Dutch

English ? Korean

English ? Portuguese (Brazil)

You may have slightly different settings for Bilingual Dictionaries (on the top half of the dialog); that’s OK. You only need to look at and change the Machine Translation settings (on the bottom of the dialog). Again, if Windows Live Translator is already selected, you don’t have to do anything.

Click OK to close the dialog. You should now be ready to translate!

Using the Translation Feature

Now find or create a document that has some content you’d like to translate.

1) Select text, right click and select Translate

The easiest way to bring up and use the translation task pane is to simply select some content in your Word document, right click, and select the “Translation” option. You can also go to the Research task pane, type a query into the box, and select the Translation subpane.

2) Select an installed language pair

By default, Word will list a variety of language pairs, even if you haven’t installed a machine translation system for those pairs. In the “From” and “To” boxes, select a source and target language that correspond to one of the language pairs you installed above.