Microsoft Translator

Damn, before clicking through I actually thought it was a translator translating between "Microsoft" and English.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/04/15/nativity-scene

The translations themselves seem good enough from the handful that I tried, but the auto-detect feature has room for improvement. For ex, I typed in "ciao" (the Italian equivalent of hi/bye), but it auto-detected German and subsequently had no translation.

I just gave the Japanese to English a quick check, and it's no better than Google or anything else I've seen. And by that I mean it completely loses the meaning of anything but the most simple sentences.

I know Japanese to English is going to be harder than languages with similar structure, but I'd still expect machine translations to be farther along than they are now.

Well, I tried a couple of articles from lemonde.fr, translating from french to english. The first worked ok, but the second... The title was "Apple dément pister les utilisateurs d'iPhone" which should translate to "Apple denies tracking iPhone users". It got translated to "Insane Apple tracks iPhone users"

For the record, Google comes up with "Apple denies iPhone users track"

Not impressed, it can't handle simple everyday phrases like "Fars ma loon?" ;-)

The indonesian to english translation looks just as good as google's.

The Tbot is pretty cool - does Google Chat have that feature?

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