Microsoft Translator

Posted by Phil on Wed 16 of Sep, 2009 22:57 GMT Germany

Only this week, I learned about the Microsoft Translator and the SOAP interface that it offers for application developers.

To test it out, I have added a button to the Translation Memory dialog, to translate texts online with the Microsoft Translator. This is immediately available in version 4.65 beta.

To my knowledge, other similar services (Google, Babel Fish) do not offer a web service interface. If anybody knows differently, I would be interested to know.

I am now thinking about how to make use of the Microsoft Translator in the Add-In. It would be possible to use it to translate a complete project (although this might be quite slow), but I am not sure that this is a good idea. It would be very easy to fill up a project with poor quality translations.

In fact, I am toying with the idea of defining an attribute for each translation, to indicate how it was entered, e.g.

  • global database
  • microsoft translator
  • spreadsheet import
  • entered directly

and indicating this with the background colour in the cells.

By the way, I am still not quite sure whether this usage is entirely compliant with the API terms of use. I will have to investigate this a bit more.

Phil

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Posted by Phil on Thu 17 of Sep, 2009 07:30 GMT Germany

I have just tried this out on a different computer and it didn't work. Clicking on the new Microsoft Translator button did nothing at all.

I will look into this and try to provide some good error messages. There may, for example, be some problems with firewalls.

Phil

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Posted by GarethJ on Thu 17 of Sep, 2009 16:52 GMT

I tried this and it works very well (for certain languages...)! We have a firewall and proxy server etc.

I think a "Translate All" option would work well as an initial translation - even if it takes a while to run.

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