Facebook and Bing make translation social

Dec 16

Machine Translation, search engines, Translation Websites

I noticed something new today when using the Microsoft Translator. It allows you to login using your Facebook account. After a little Googling (or perhaps I should say Binging for the sake of political correctness) I learned that earlier this week Facebook and Bing announced a partnership that brings Facebook “Like” data and profile search to Bing. Read the post from Mashable here.

The Mashable post and other similar posts made no mention of the social aspect in Microsoft Translator. But the fact that Bing’s translator wants you to sign in with your Facebook account indicates that translation in Microsoft’s world is going to get more social and more targeted.

What does this mean? Well I can think of a few things. First of all, Microsoft and Facebook will start collecting information on your use of language, specifically the foreign languages that a member is interested in. That will allow them to provide you with targeted information and ads based on your international interests. Additionally, the social network will become more international and allow better matching of people who speak different languages. For example: say you are translating information about an Italian product into English. Facebook can show you what people in Italy are saying about that product and allow you to chat with people in Italy to get more information. This is a new direction for Microsoft translation and can give them something extra that Google does not have.

To end on another note: Google announced yesterday in its Google Translate blog that they launched a new feature to provide you with alternate translations for each phrase in the translated text. That very same feature was released a few days earlier by Systran in its new Desktop 7 product (see blog post I wrote about it here). In fact, Systran takes the feature one step further: you can force the use of the alternate meaning in future translations in one click. That way, if you prefer a certain translation of a term, that is the translation that will be used in future translations.