Microsoft Translator updated with new Widget and API enhancements for collaborative translation

With all the big news at D9 and E3 recently, it’s easy to let news like this slip by. Today, the Microsoft Translator team (which powers Bing Translator) posted on their blog a new release of their product, bringing new features and enhancements for their Widget and APIs:

Microsoft Translator Widget

  • Manage TranslatorsManage Translators: The popular Microsoft Translator widget, which has been used by thousands of websites to instantly deliver translated pages to their visitors, is receiving a major update. The collaborative translations feature that we released as a technology preview last year is now complete, and adds a user and role management system that enables site owners to collaborate with their visitors, trusted translators and moderators to tailor the translations to their content. The sometimes less than perfect quality of the Machine Translation system is no longer preventing you from delivering your site in high quality to a worldwide audience!
  • Manage TranslationsManage Translations: Now that you can invite experts, your friends or your users to help tailor the translations for your site, how do you manage all these edits that are flowing in? How to make sure you can weed out edits that might not really be relevant for your content? What about languages that you don’t know? Delivered in this release is also a dashboard to moderate and approve translation edits in bulk. The site owner and the invited users can utilize the dashboard to approve, moderate or hide alternative translations in bulk.
  • Pending SuggestionsSee sentences with pending suggestions: In addition to using the bulk editing feature, you can also simply browser the pages and see which translations have pending suggestions. The widget will highlight for you what you need to look at and approve or reject. A blue highlight is for the translation suggestions, a red highlight is for the pending rejections.
  • Fresh new design for the Collaborative Translation functionality: Based on feedback from beta users, and taking into account usability considerations we refreshed and streamlined the user experience of showing/editing alternative translations. This should make it easier for users to immediately get some information about how the community is using the alternatives, select their favorite alternative or provide a new alternative

Microsoft Translator API

  • Full access to the edits from your community: We promised to give you access to the alternative translations that have been generated as you worked with your community to tailor the translations to your site or scenario. We are pleased to add this functionality to the Microsoft Translator API. It is beta, so please be gentle.
  • More flexibility around API traffic limits: We are removing the fixed limit on the number of requests per minute that you could push to the service. We are replacing it with a more flexible mechanism that we will outline in an upcoming blog post.

If you’re a site owner and signed up for the collaborative translation feature last year, you should finally be seeing your invitations in your inboxes soon.



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