Text is translated by computer software automatically and without human involvement. Web pages about computer-related topics are translated by Microsoft’s own state-of-the-art statistical machine translation technology which has been trained on large amounts of computer-related data. Web pages about other topics or into languages that are not included in Microsoft’s eight currently supported languages are translated by translation software from Systran.

Language translation is extremely difficult, as the meaning of words and phrases often depends on the context and specialized knowledge of the domain area or culture. Sentence structures and grammatical rules vary significantly between two languages, which adds to the complexity of the translation challenge. Currently, it still requires human skills to translate sentences without errors. The quality of today's most advanced translation software is well below the accuracy and fluency of a professional translator, and many sentences are simply not understandable. Researchers are continuously working on improvements, but it may be many years before high quality translation can be consistently offered by a computer. For this reason, we display both the original text and its translation, anticipating that you will find it easier to understand the translation and to compare it with the original content if needed.

Some of our translation results (usually for computer-related content) are based on training our translation system on large amounts of bilingual text. The more bilingual or multilingual text we can train our system on, the better our translation quality will become. If you have large amounts of any kind of translated text you would be willing to share with us, please click here to let us know.

Html and Text. The viewer will not translate text on images, in PDFs, or in Flash graphics and animation. It may also not translate some dynamically generated text, such as in cascading menus.

Microsoft’s own translation system is used for translation from English into: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (simplified and traditional), and Japanese. Other languages are translated using software from Systran.

You may either submit a one-click star rating on the Translator home page, or use the Feedback link in the footer of the home page and the Bilingual Viewer. If non-offensive text has resulted in an offensive translation by mistake, you may also report this by clicking on the link “Report offensive translations” which, like the star rating option, is available on the Translator home page after a translation has been submitted.

Browser	Version	Operating System
Internet Explorer	7.0	Windows Vista & Windows XP SP2
Internet Explorer	6.x	Windows XP SP2 & Windows 2003
Firefox	2.0	Mac OS X 10.4 & Windows XP SP2

This link is available when Live Search has found a web page which is in a different language than the default (or chosen) language for your browser, and if we can offer a translation between the web page language and your default language.

Please visit the Microsoft Research Machine Translation Team Blog (English) for additional / current information.