Windows 7 – Lost in Translation
Windows 7, Microsoft's next iteration of the Windows client and the successor of Windows Vista, is nothing short of lost in translation.
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14.7.2008 Microsoft Launches Translation Service
Microsoft launched a service for automatic translation called Windows Live Translator. The site lets you translate a text limited to 500 words or a web page from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian.
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9.9.2007Windows Live Messenger translation bot now available
The Microsoft Translator team is excited to announce the new translation bot for Windows Live Messenger! This Messenger bot does translations for you.
Just add
mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and start chatting. You can have one-on-one conversations with
the bot, or you can invite a friend and chat in different languages with the bot translating for you. As usual, remember that machine translation
isnt perfect “ slang especially will give the engine trouble.
winbeta.org -
03.09.2008Google Switches to Its Own Translation System
Google switched the translation system from Systran to its own
machine translation system for all
the 25 language pairs
available on the site. Until now, Google used its own
system only for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.
"Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have
been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars. Several research systems,
including ours, take a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and
aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation
model,"
explains Franz Och.
winbeta.org -
23.10.2007Microsoft rolls out translation bot for Live Messenger
Microsoft announced today a new translation bot for Windows Live Messenger, allowing users to translate strings of text to one of 12 different
languages by simply sending a message to the bot. Users can take take advantage of this feature by adding "mtbot@hotmail.com" to their contact
lists.
If you've got a friend in your contacts that a speaks a different language, you can invite them to a chat, include the mtbot,
and translation will be performed for you on the fly. However, the team behind the project warns "because machine translation isn’t perfect,
slang especially will give the engine trouble."
Currently available are English to/from: Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional,
Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian (to English only), Spanish. Also available are Chinese Simplified to/from
Chinese Traditional. They plan to add additional languages over the next few months.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
09.09.2008Sun's Scott McNealy: Lost in translation
Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy said he was misquoted in a South Korean newspaper earlier this week as saying
Sun and cell phone maker Samsung Electronics are working on an
iPhone-killer.
McNealy, who stopped in New York Thursday on his way back from South Korea to deliver a speech at the World
Business Forum, said that the newspaper must have misunderstood a translation of what he had said.
"I never said that," he
said. "I'm not really sure where they got that. I think it was a translation problem."
When pressed further during an
interview with CNET News.com, McNealy remained tight-lipped on any news.
winbeta.org -
12.10.2007Microsoft Launches Translation Service
Microsoft launched a service for
automatic translation called
Windows Live Translator. The site lets you translate a text
limited to 500 words or a web page from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian.
Microsoft uses
Systran to produce most of the translations, but also offers an
option to translate computer-related texts using
a machine
translation system developed in-house. Microsoft's translation technology has been used to translate technical materials, including
MSDN Library.
"Recent research in
Machine Translation (MT) has focused on data-driven systems. Such systems are self-customizing in the sense that they can learn the translations of
terminology and even stylistic phrasing from already translated materials. Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT) system is such a data-driven system, and it
has been customized to translate Microsoft technical materials through the automatic processing of hundreds of thousands of sentences from Microsoft
product documentation and support articles, together with their corresponding translations."
winbeta.org -
09.09.2007Microsoft's new translation tool keeps Web users on same page
A new translation widget from Microsoft Research lets Web developers offer their sites in alternative languages on their own pages, without shifting
users to a different site. A technology preview of the free widget
was released today at the
company's Mix conference in Las Vegas...
winbeta.org -
19.03.2009Windows Live Translator now with Office integration
Windows Live Translator is coming to Office 2003 or 2007 as a Research pane option. According to the
MSR-MT Team Blog, the new feature
will be coming out soon as an automatic update to Office:
We have officially handed over our code to the Microsoft Office team
for the integration of the translation tool directly in the Research Task Pane. Once they have finished their own testing and "flipped the
switch" on their side, the feature will auto-update in existing versions of Office. I'll blog about that here again when that happens -
at that point, no additional setup steps will be necessary.
winbeta.org -
08.08.2008Google Brings Cross-Language Translation to Search Appliance
An experimental feature lets Google Search Appliance translate documents in 34 languages. Search engine giant Google is looking to stimulate more
international interest in its GSA search device, a rare piece of IT infrastructure hardware Google offers to businesses. The idea is to help Google's
enterprise search gain favor over offerings from Microsoft Fast, Endeca, Autonomy, Vivisimo and other vendors.
winbeta.org -
18.12.2008Microsoft: No Plans for Zune Outside US
Correcting a translation error
that sparked a number of
reports stating Microsoft
planned to release its Zune
portable music player in
Europe, but not until 2008,
the company now says it has no
set timeframe. The confusion
came in a response Steve
Ballmer made to a German
magazine.
In the
proper translation, Ballmer
said that "we decided not to
enter new markets so far" and
will not do so until "after
we have reached some of the
goals outlined. When this will
be the case, I cannot tell you
today." Zune product manager
Cesar Menendez further
clarified the situation,
stating, "We will not expand
the device family or our
geographical footprint until
we are positive that we can
provide the best experience
from the start."
winbeta.org -
05.06.2007Facebook users translate the site again, this time to German
The translation project that was only announced at the beginning of the year for Facebook has already made massive progress with only the help of
volunteers...
betanews.com -
04.03.2008No Plans for Zune Outside US
Correcting a translation error
that sparked a number of
reports stating Microsoft
planned to release its Zune
portable music player in
Europe, but not until 2008,
the company now says it has no
set timeframe. The confusion
came in a response Steve
Ballmer made to a German
magazine.
In the proper translation,
Ballmer said that "we decided
not to enter new markets so
far" and will not do so until
"after we have reached some
of the goals outlined. When
this will be the case, I
cannot tell you today." Zune
product manager Cesar Menendez
further clarified the
situation, stating, "We will
not expand the device family
or our geographical footprint
until we are positive that we
can provide the best
experience from the start."
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05.06.2007EU Offers Translation Resource to Developers
The European Commission is offering translation software developers free access to around one million sentences translated between 22 of the European
Union's 23 official languages. It hopes the data will help improve the quality of a variety of language tools, including grammar and spelling
checkers, online dictionaries and machine translators-- particularly in less well-served languages such as Latvian or Romanian.
The sentences are mostly drawn from the "Acquis Communautaire," the body of law that must be implemented by all new E.U. member states, and
include the treaties, directives and regulations adopted by the E.U., and rulings from the European Court of Justice.
Translated
by professional translators, they cover topics such as IT, telecommunications, labor law, agriculture and fishing.
winbeta.org -
22.01.2008Microsoft Launches Own 'Babel Fish'
While Altavista has largely disappeared from the minds of most Internet users since the emergence of Google, the Web property does still have a very
popular service: its Babel Fish translator. Now, Microsoft is testing its own translation offering under the Windows Live umbrella...
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11.09.2007Yahoo Rolls Out Translation
Services
Yahoo on Thursday introduced
Babel Fish, using the same
technologies that have been
used by the version hosted on
Alta Vista for almost a
decade. The page, which looks
much like Alta Vista's
version, has been updated with
some additional features to
tie it in with other Yahoo
services...
betanews.com -
28.04.2006Microsoft and DAISY Help Enhance Reading Experience for People with Print Disabilities
A tool for Microsoft Word, to be released as a downloadable plug-in at no charge early next year, will enable the translation of millions of Open XML
documents into DAISY XML, the lingua franca of the globally accepted standard for digital talking books...
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13.11.2007Google: Looking towards IPv6
Lorenzo Colitti: We care a lot about the health of the Internet. Recently, we've become increasingly concerned that
IPv4 addresses the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet are running out.
Current
projections place IPv4 address space exhaustion somewhere in late 2011, and while technologies such as
Network Address Translation (NAT) can offer temporary respite, they
complicate the Internet's architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.
That's why we're pleased to let you know that Google search is also available over
IPv6 at
ipv6.google.com (you'll need an IPv6 connection to view it). While IPv4 provides about four billion IP addresses not enough to
assign one to every one of Earth's more than six billion inhabitants IPv6 provides enough address space to assign almost three million networks to
every person on the planet.
winbeta.org -
14.05.2008Microsoft applications from China mine the Web
Microsoft researchers in Beijing are developing applications that mine online data to track human relationships and help with translation, lab
managers said Monday.
Another program in development analyzes satellite positioning data to direct users to interesting locations
by mobile phone.
winbeta.org -
20.04.2009Microsoft, VMware Agree: They Better Cooperate
VMware and Microsoft both say
they are working behind the
scenes to make it easier for
virtualization users to
migrate across their differing
virtualization environments
and run each other's
virtualized files.
But so far, it's only
virtual kumbaya. Neither one
is saying how they're going
to do it.
XenSource,
the company sponsoring the
open source Xen hypervisor, is
a Microsoft partner and said
it too is a party to the
out-of-the-limelight talks and
will heed any agreed upon
standards or translation
methods. No single specific
standard, such as a shared
virtual file format, is under
discussion, however.
"Initiatives are
underway. They're just not
ready for disclosure," said
Patrick Lin, VMware's senior
director of product
management, at the end of a
panel sponsored by chip maker
AMD at the Westin San
Francisco. ..
winbeta.org -
21.06.2007iPod Touch being adopted for networked warfare
The United States military is taking Apple's iPod touch onto the battlefield. A report shows that the iPod Touch is perfect for "networked
warfare" and that it will allow soldiers to be linked together and view shared data across the battlefield. An example of how it might be used is
that images being sent back by an UAV could be shared to all soldiers across the battlefield giving them the best available options on how to engage
the enemy from their perspective locations. Other tools such as translation software are being adopted to help soldiers communicate with local
citizens without the aid of a human translator.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
20.04.2009Much-maligned feature being added to IPv6
In a high-tech twist of irony, the Internet engineering community is adding a feature to IPv6 that the upgrade to the Internet's main communications
protocol was supposed to eliminate.
One of the design goals for IPv6 was that it would rid the Internet of network address
translation (NAT), gateways that match increasingly scarce public IPv4 addresses with private IPv4 addresses used inside corporations, government
agencies and other organizations.
winbeta.org -
21.07.2008
