A little while ago I was asked to figure out a solution to a user experience problem that was affecting some of our offerings such as the Bing text and web page translators. A “bug” was assigned to me, asking me to weigh in on how to deal with a problem of plenty: Given we were about to add a substantial set of new languages we were running out of space to display them properly. What could be a quick interim fix?

Several months ago, while announcing the availability of Hebrew in our language list, I had requested our community of users what else they wanted to see supported. Taking into account all the feedback that came in since then, we have been hard at work to add support to new languages. This is why it’s always a pleasure to encounter problems like the one above – they indicate that this work was coming to fruition.

I am happy to announce the addition of seven new languages to our translation service. As always, they will be immediately available for your use through the APIs and all the products that consume the service. Here is the list of languages that have been added in the latest release. In addition there have been several updates to the Haitian Creole language since we last talked about it here.

New languages:

ROM – Romanian
NOR – Norwegian
HUN – Hungarian
SKY – Slovak
SLO – Slovenian
LTH – Lithuanian
TRK – Turkish

This brings our languages supported number to 30 languages. Here is the full list:

Currently available:

ARA – Arabic
CHS – Chinese Simplified
CHT – Chinese Traditional
NLD – Dutch
ENU – English
FRA – French
DEU – German
HEB – Hebrew
HT – Haitian Creole
ITA – Italian
JPN – Japanese
KOR – Korean
PLK – Polish
PTB – Portuguese
RUS – Russian
ESN – Spanish
CSY – Czech
DAN – Danish
ELL – Greek
SVE – Swedish
THA – Thai
BGR – Bulgarian
FIN – Finnish
ROM – Romanian
NOR – Norwegian
HUN – Hungarian
SKY – Slovak
SLO – Slovenian
LTH – Lithuanian
TRK – Turkish

Head on over to our forums if you have specific feedback or looking for discussions about these new languages. We continue to work on adding even more languages to the service, so please keep sending us feedback and stay tuned for other announcements on this blog.

With the addition of these new languages, the approach I recommended in the short term is visible in the translation toolbar – the language list uses a smaller font size. In the future, we intend to move to either a multiple column list, or another style of display for the list.

I will look forward to more such problems, since it means we are meeting more expectations from you – our users. Enjoy the new languages!

 

– Vikram Dendi, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Translator