Wednesday, March 25, 2009 by Per Ploug Hansen

During this years Microsoft Mix conference (which Niels, Paul Sterling and I attended) Microsoft Translator was announced (along with alot of other great stuff, which you can find on the mix site)

Microsoft translator is a Machine translation webservice, so you simply tell it to translate a piece of text from one language to another, it is very impressive and really really fast.

Integrating it with umbraco was a breeze, actually it was done during the translator Q&A session which took place at mix, half an hour of coding in total, which resulted in near-instant translation of new pages added to an umbraco site into multiple languages from english.

Now sit back, and enjoy the music while you view the video below to see how this works:


And then download this zip file to get the code.

How to use:

Copy the translatehandler.cs to the app_code folder, and setup the different configuration values. And get a AppID from microsoft here (it's free)

12 comment(s) for “Microsoft translator and umbraco”

  1. Gravatar ImageRichard Says:

    Man this is awesome. Thanks for sharing. Would be great to have something similar for dictionary items. Don't know if you have some spare time left ;-)

    Thanks,

    Richard

  2. Gravatar ImageDouglas Robar Says:

    VERY nice! Opens up a lot of possibilities for quick multi-lingual sites.

    One question, though...
    Suppose I want to create related sites with machine-translated pages as you've explained. This gets me a very fast multi-lingual site.

    Then, I hire a professional translator to review/update the microsoft translation to make the pages even better.

    If I then re-publish the original page, will the related pages be re-translated and the human translation lost?

    cheers,
    doug.

  3. Gravatar ImageGert Abilfdskov Says:

    I just feel in love MICROSOFT Translater service....

    WOW it can save time and money...

  4. Gravatar ImageHendy Says:

    WOW ! @Douglas, how about adding a flag to the page to enable / disable the auto translation ?

  5. Gravatar ImageTom Maton Says:

    My god that is awesome!!

  6. Gravatar ImageKalle Wibeck Says:

    **Very smooth!**

    Are there any listings about which languages MSTranslator will support in the future? Google Translate handles 41 languages atm...
    http://translate.google.com/

    // ; ) Kalle

  7. Gravatar ImageCasey Neehouse Says:

    Very nice! Great job Per!

  8. Gravatar ImageJesper Ordrup Says:

    Blæret (sorry that was danish).

    What an fantastic high paced showoff of Umbraco extendability. It was so interesting that I stayed even tough that completly anoying, lousy, dilletantsounding and shitty music played out loud most of the time. I could have turned down the volume but I forgot :-)


    Richard, Dough - my guess is that everything is possible. Since this is probably what you call a technology preview (showoff) there's probaply not that may config options. But they can be added. Whatever changes you need you can do in the event handler.

  9. Gravatar ImageLars Says:

    Yeah, from the technical side it really looks pretty impressive!

    But I see one BIG problem which makes it just useless.

    The output of all these automatic translators, no difference if microsoft or google, is just crap!

    A pretty good example is already shown in the video. The transaled german text ist just nonsense. Most times you can't even guess what the authors intention of the text was...

  10. Gravatar ImageNeil Says:

    Have to agree with Lars. I look after a website thats translated into 29 languages and I can tell you we could never rely on automated translation.

    Once you succuum to needing a human, why use the translator at all?

  11. Gravatar ImagePer Ploug Hansen Says:

    @Lars & @Neil

    Absolutely, there is no doubt that machine translation is not nearly good enough for a public site.

    The *impressive* part of the video above is how fast the webservice works and how few lines you actually need to integrate it into umbraco, and just a good sample of how easy umbraco's event model is to work with.


  12. Gravatar ImageNeil Says:

    @Per Agreed!

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