For the last year, Microsoft has been trying to play catchup with Google in the world of free online translation. For the most part, Google Translate has enjoyed a commanding lead over Microsoft’s Bing Translator in almost every aspect including translation quality, number of languages supported and software support. Microsoft enjoyed one small victory when it was first to announce support of free online Haitian Creole translation on January 31, 2010. But not to be outdone, Google came out with their own Haitian Creole tool a few days later.
Now, however, it appears that Microsoft has come up with a winning solution for website translation which may give it some primacy over Google in the translation industry. Microsoft’s new website translation widget and the collaboration feature it incorporates is an intelligent and visionary concept which will be suitable for many website owners: it provides each website owner with a custom translation memory (TM) that contains human translation which was approved by the owner. The TM is totally private and is not shared with any other websites.
Microsoft has come up with a very ambitious concept. The big question is: will it work? Keep reading to get a first look at the collaboration feature and for some exclusive new information about Microsoft’s website translation widget from Chris Wendt, Program Manager for MT at Microsoft.
Google’s translation widget translates all websites with the same MT. Website owners can customize marginal aspects of the MT (mostly by tagging text as do-not-translate). But on the whole, customers have no control over the MT. And while Google’s MT probably has the best quality, customers are riding a bull.
Microsoft’s concept allows website owners to authorize specific translators to approve changes in the MT. Once the translation is approved, the website translation widget will insert the custom MT (and not the general MT as is done in Google). In this manner, the widget can translate a website with human translation. The foundations for this revolutionary concept were laid in the announcement of the Version 2 translation widget and API (click here to read the official announcement). The new version features Collaborative Translations, which allows website visitors to suggest translations which they believe to be better than the current MT. You may ask, what is new about this collaboration? Google has been using this for a while. But there is a big difference: when a translator suggests an alternative translation in Google Translate, it is sucked into a black hole. What happens with these suggestions? Nobody knows for sure. But in Microsoft, users get to review all the various suggestions and vote on which one is the best (similar to the concept used by Facebook). But ultimately, it is the website owner alone who can choose which translation is to go into the translation memory.
Microsoft’s collaboration feature is in the Beta stage (I would actually call it Alpha). Many of the functions do not work yet. And you will need a special Invite code from Microsoft to use the collaboration feature. I would like to thank Chris Wendt of Microsoft for giving me an Invite code and allowing me to test the new widget. Mr. Wendt also was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the product; please keep reading to see these comments.
Does it work?
The backend of the system does not work yet. The system for rating and approving translators does not fully work, therefore the MT customization does not yet work either. Now, when there are several translation suggestions available all of them are displayed to the user and the user can pick her/his favorite one.
In Summary
Once Microsoft gets this system to work as advertised, it will be great solution for customers that are looking for high quality, low-cost website translation. But in order for it to succeed, it has to be easy to use and bug-free. And that seems like a very challenging task. I hope they can do it.
Have you worked with Microsoft’s Website Translation Widget? Or their Translation API? Please tell us about your experiences.
Comments made by Chris Wendt to GTS Blog on 3.17.10
David Grunwald: Where are the community collaborative translations stored? Does anyone moderate these comments? How does a website owner implement the community changes? If a few people suggest translations for one sentence, which one is applied.
Chris Wendt: The community translations are stored in a translation memory hosted by the Microsoft Translator service, indexed by your appid. The users of your site can vote on the submissions. Until approved, a submission is only visible as a suggestion, never as the default showing up on viewing your site. You can always approve any submission, or not. Using the API, you are able to delegate the approval to certain users of your site, using the “rating” levels available in the API. Anyone who you give permission to rate a submission with a rating of 5 or better can approve the submissions. Until approved, a submission will not appear by default on your site, regardless of the number of votes it received. Until a submission is approved, the translation provided by Microsoft Translator remains the default translation.
DG: If I understand correctly, once a revised translation is made by someone with rating 5 or better it replaces the Microsoft MT when someone translate your website using the widget.
CW: Exactly correct.
DG: What I do not understand is this: say there are 5 websites that have an identical sentence: “Acme widgets are compatible with industry standards.” And all 5 website owners accept a different version of the translation. Who’s version will you use?
CW: We will use the version that was accepted by the web site owner on his/her site, and not on the others. The entry from another website will only show up as a suggestion..
DG: Does MS create TMs for each website and use that specific version?
CW: Conceptually yes. In reality it is a single large TM, filtered by the (Bing) appid when rendering a site.
DG: Will that scale up for all the websites that will use the V2 API collaboration feature?
CW: Yes.
DG: What if a million websites sign up? Will you be able to handle that many individual TMs?
CW: Yes.
DG: Also, will your TM use any kind of domain-specific tagging?
CW: Currently it doesn’t but I won’t rule that out for the future.
DG: The ‘Flag’ button does not work.
CW: The flag button decreases the # of votes by 1. We know it looks like nothing happened. Will be fixed soon, giving you a visual clue that your negative vote was registered.
DG: How do I rate translators? I can not see how.
CW: You rate translations. Once you voted for a translation, it becomes the authorized translation of this sentence for your site. In a future update you’ll be able to get stats on who did which edits, so you can expose scoring of the most prolific editors.
DG: And does a translator need a MS ID and login before making suggestions?
CW: No. Will be stored as an anonymous submission.
DG: And one more question: once I approve a translation, will the mouse-over work to display the original sentence? Will the ‘More Translations’ link still be displayed?
CW: Yes.
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