Our team is celebrating a major milestone today – last week we successfully transitioned all of our translation services to technology developed right here in Microsoft Research! 

As some of you may have noticed, up until last week, some of our languages were still supported by a third party technology for general domain requests.  Here’s the summary of what this release means:

• Translation now fully powered by the Microsoft Translator technology is available through Live Search, as well as IE8, the Windows Live Toolbar, and Windows Live Messenger.
• All translation pairs on the site (11 English-X, 12 X-English) are powered by Microsoft Research-developed systems.
• Two transliteration pairs (chs<->cht), courtesy of the Windows International team.
• For several languages, better language quality.
• And finally, the release of TBot, a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger.

This release is the combination of all the effort that the team has put into machine translation, not only over the past months, but literally over the past years.  We are eager to hear back from our users – try out the system today and let us know what you think!