Extensive Language Support in Bing Translator and Windows 7, Windows Live Messenger

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 09 Jul 2009

The list of languages that Bing Translator, Microsoft’s machine translation technology, covers includes some of the best known languages out there, like French, German and Japanese, to name but a few. To the list of languages Bing Translator provides support for you can now add one more: Hebrew. According to the Redmond-based software giant this latest addition is part of the company’s commitment to include support for more and more languages to Bing Translator while at the same time adhering to a high standard of quality.

“I am pleased to announce that we just added Hebrew to the list of languages that we support. You can immediately use it in Bing Translator, in IE8, with the widget, with the messenger bot, inside Office and of course with the API. I would like to congratulate our language quality and coverage team on the progress they have been making with new languages. Over the next few months you will see more languages added to the mix, and also continue to see quality improvements for existing languages,” explained the Microsoft Translator team.

Moving on, you should know that Windows 7 will also provide extensive language support – as a matter of fact it will provide support for a total of 36 languages but this support will be rolled out gradually. On top of that Windows 7 will feature 50 new fonts.

When Windows 7 will become generally available on the 22nd of October, it will provide support for only 14 languages: English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Chinese (Hong Kong). Support for an additional 21 languages (thus 36 in total) will be made available on the 31st of October: Turkish, Czech, Portuguese, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Greek, Ukrainian, Romanian, Arabic, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Thai, Croatian, Serbian Latin, and Latvian.

“Our goal for Windows 7 is to deliver exciting features that benefit users worldwide as well as features that make Windows feel local to every user. Like Windows 7's focus to improve the fundamental scenarios of performance and reliability, we improved our processes to allow us to deliver a great customer experience in every language and every country we serve, including delivery of Windows 7 as close to simultaneously as possible worldwide,” commented the Windows International Team.

Moving on still, you should also know that the list of languages supported by the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit has been increased and now boasts about supporting a total of 40 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Basque, Finnish, French, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malayalam, Marathi, Malay, Norwegian (Bokml), Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian – Cyrillic, Serbian – Latin, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional).

Thanks to Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit any web developer/webmaster can include Microsoft’s IM client into the site he maintains, thus allowing the user to socialize without having to install Windows Live Messenger. With the extended language support the toolkit provides, that developer/webmaster can configure the IM client’s UI Controls in accordance to their localized needs.


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