Comments

1. alexfung

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 9:14PM  

   Cute!

   I read it in Traditional Chinese. It is generally readable but funny:

   "Back during..." is translated literally. It becomes "The MSWT is now back from the process of MIX09". It is one of the places Yahoo did better.

   "people with websites" became "people infected with websites" (like with a disease). yahoo does this phrase correctly.

   "awesome". The translation means more like "awestruck" (as if it were a god). But Yahoo does exactly the same thing.

   All the shortforms did not work: 've, 'd, 's. They are left as is, untranslated. Same problem with Yahoo.

   "Below" becomes "noodles". In Simplified Chinese, they are the same word. In Traditional, they are different word with the same sound.

   "if you are fluent...". All the parts of the sentence are translated reasonably, but the word order is completely messed up and it will take a bit time for a reader to figure out what you are saying. This also happens with the longer and more complicated sentenses.

   "will be appreciated". Translation is literally accurate, but in Chinese we don't use the future tense in this situation. So it reads weird.

   "on how well" becomes "how many". I can't understand how it can get wrong here.

   "specially". Seems the translater is particular weak in handling adverbs at the end of the sentence. It just drop the translated adjectival form at the same location. I can't guess what it meant until I re-read the original English sentence.

   "leaving that feedback on", translated in the sense of "keeping it there, leaving it behind". Yahoo on the other hand, treated "leaving" in the sense of "get away", just as amusing.

   "register for an invite code" became "register to be an invite code".

   In general, elementary sentence parts are reasonably translated with occasional intriguing mistakes. Longer sentences are usually messed up because the translated can't completely understand the structure, and even if it does, cannot easily map it into another language.

   The overall quality is comparable to Yahoo. I think the MSTW handles some sentence fragments better: "was announced.", "- which is [awesome]", "I would love to", "add the [MSTW to you website]". It indicates that MSTW has hardcoded specific knowledge on these structures. On the other hand, you can see that MSTW did some funny stuff where Yahoo did much better.
2. Brandon LeBlanc

   

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 9:20PM  

   alexfung, thank you for your feedback! Much appreciated!
3. alexfung

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 9:27PM  

   French. I haven't really read through the transated article. But it is strange that the first character after full stop isn't capitalised.
4. alexfung

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 9:28PM  

   Japanese. It is funny. You can look at it even if you don't understand Japanese. MSTW is translated as "Microsoft Account-Alerts-Barcode-Calendar-Clipboard-Contacts-Core-Custom"! Who can propose a theory why?
5. Brandon LeBlanc

   

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 9:37PM  

   alexfung, what did the Microsoft Translator Widget translate as "Microsoft Account-Alerts-Barcode-Calendar-Clipboard-Contacts-Core-Custom"?
6. alexfung

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 10:15PM  

   Try translate this page to Japanese. Whenever the text says "Microsoft Translator Widget", the translated Japanese text says "Microsoft Account-Alerts-Barcode-Calendar-Clipboard-Contacts-Core-Custom".

   BTW, MSTW keeps the word "Widget" when translating to Chinese. Yahoo translated it to something probably correct but incomprehensible to me. Although Chinese is my mother tongue, I can only understand technical terms and jargons when they are presented in English.
7. 7flavor

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 10:52PM  

   Microsoft's Translation technology rocks! Can't wait for more languages to be supported (especially Indic). Also, I'm surprised we don't yet have a Sidebar gadget for Live Translator although there's a Live Toolbar button. Gadget please?
8. newscientist2000

   
   Posted on: April 16, 2009 at 11:40PM  

   Well it works great, and the translations of this page are very fast.

   The only thing I do not like about the widget is that everything is not controlled in the widget box, for example when you translate a page from English to Spanish, there is no option within the widget to return i.e. translate English to English by providing English on the drop down menu, or a button to turn off the translation on the widget.

   Its easy enough to click the bar at the top of the screen to turn off a translation, but it would be nice to have a return to native language button on the widget, a little back arrow or something would suffice, that way I dont have to move my mouse very far.
9. brio

   
   Posted on: April 17, 2009 at 4:41AM  

   I've tested the translator translating the blog post into german. And the result isn't very good, hardly readable. Often the syntax isn't correct. I have the feeling the translator just translate word for word which is unfortunately often insufficient.

   One more thing I noticed: The translator does not understand things like this: "I'd", it doesn't detect that theres a verb and just tanslate it to "Ich'd".

   mfg brio
10. alt-92

    
    Posted on: April 17, 2009 at 6:27AM  

    I concur with the above poster, seems that germanic languages are notoriously hard to do by machine translations.

    for instance: the Blogpost title reads:

    Windows Experience Blog - Uit de Microsoft NAT pictogram inschakelt testen.

    Normal Dutch version :

    Test de Microsoft Vertaler 'widget'

    Grammatically, we're all over the place but nowhere near what it should read like.