Following the release of its online translation system in September 2007, Microsoft has now released a translation tool that allows you to translate your web pages into different languages for free. You can obtain the free code for the tool by going to http://translator.live.com/AddIn.aspx.
After testing and evaluating Microsoft’s tool, one might ask how a company like Microsoft could release such an inferior, sub par product. It not only features a highly flawed design concept, it is riddled with bugs as well.
Once you install the tool, it provides a pulldown menu with the phrase “translate this site” in each native language. Since the initial language displayed is Arabic, it appears unclear how anyone besides Arabic readers will know what to do. Additionally, translating a page is a cumbersome 2-step process: you need to first select the language and then click a small arrow icon. And since the tool offers no instructions or intuitive guidance, some of your website users may not even know how to use it once you get it installed.
In 2 of the 3 browsers that we used to test the tool (including Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer 6), the encoding of some of the text inside the pulldown menu (such as Arabic, the first visible language) is not recognized by the browser and the result is garbaged text. Once you get the tool to work (it won’t work in Firefox versions under 2.0), it displays the translation on a split screen together with the original English language page. This also is also odd: why would someone who needs a translation need the original as well? If they can read English, why bother to translate?
It appears that Microsoft messed up on this one, and one would expect a new release of Microsoft’s free translation tool in the near future.
