The Translator team is excited to announce the availability of the English to Russian language pair on MicrosoftTranslator.com.  This language pair is now available across all implementations of the translator technology, including Live Search and (in the next few days) the Windows Live Messenger TBot. 

You have probably noticed that the Russian to English language pair has been available for some time on our site.  As always, translation quality is a top focus for our team.  Sometimes reaching quality takes longer for a particular direction – this can be for many reasons.  For example, if you are translating between a simple language and a complex language, the translations will be better going to the simple language than they will be going to the complex language.  If you are interested in learning more about the technology behind our machine translation engine, see Will Lewis’ blog post on statistical machine translation.

While machine translation is certainly never perfect, for this new language pair we have now hit our quality bar for release.  How do we determine the quality bar?  In general, when the translation can be considered “useful”.  We consistently receive feedback from our users that imperfect translation which is useful is better than no translation.  So we have to balance user demand with translation quality.  With that in mind, we test our language pairs with human evaluations, until we have reached “useful” translation. 

We are always open to your constructive feedback and help – please continue to help us so that we can keep improving quality!  We are always very grateful for good feedback. 

Some other updates in this release you may notice:

· We have officially migrated our domain to www.microsofttranslator.com

· Improved quality across several language pairs, due to improvements in training data quality

· Improvements in Japanese to English, due to an improved method of parsing the training data