When Live was first released it's true to say that I was disappointed because all other competitive search engines had online translation tools and these were missing from Live. I think it is fair to say that Microsoft has delivered now. The basic online translator, Microsoft Translator, has been available for some time now but at MIX 09 Microsoft announced a widget and various APIs and tools that build on the translation engine and open up machine translation to a much broader range of applications. This post describes what's available and how you can get started.

Microsoft Translator provides the basic online interactive translation facility like Google, Alta Vista and everyone else. Translation is from English to 13 languages and vice versa (there are no language pairs that are not either to or from English). The Microsoft Translator site also accepts URL parameters that allow you to tell it to automatically translate a site:-

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?lp=en_fr&lo=TP&a=www.guysmithferrier.com

The "lp" parameter is the language pair ("en_fr" specifies that the translation is from English to French), the "lo" parameter is the page layout of the translation result ("TP" specifies that the page should be shown as translated with the original language appearing as tooltips) and the "a" parameter is the URL to translate. This facility is very useful for being able to send links of translated pages.

The first major announcement at MIX was the Translator Widget. The translator widget is a snippet of HTML and JavaScript that you add to your page that provides translation facilities for your page. You can try it out on this site (see the blue "Microsoft Translator" box on the top left hand side of this page). You can also see it working on http://www.dotneti18n.com. To add one of these to your site you need to request a widget code from http://www.microsofttranslator.com/widget (you can't copy the HTML/JavaScript from a site that already has the widget because the code only works for the site it was generated for).

The Translator Widget is certainly a great starting point but you can provide finer control over the translation process using the Translator AJAX API. This allows you to call into the translation API to specify what parts of the page should be translated and how. To use the AJAX API you need to request a (different) code from http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ajax.

The area that is of greatest interest to me, however, is the HTTP REST API. This provides programmatic access to the Microsoft Translator API from any code that can make HTTP calls. As such it is perfect for utilities like the Resource Administrator on http://www.dotneti18n.com that translates resx files. Again you need to request an "app id" to use this API (this is a different code from the widget code and the AJAX API code) and you can request one from http://search.live.com/developers/appids.aspx. Armed with your AppId you can use an HttpWebRequest to execute POST requests like this:-

http://api.microsofttranslator.com/V1/Http.svc/Translate?appId=yourAppId&from=en&to=es

where the content is the text that you want to translate.

The following resources will help you get up to speed on all of these:-

• Getting Started With Microsoft Translator (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd575235.aspx)
• The Microsoft Translator Interactive SDK (http://sdk.microsofttranslator.com)
• The Microsoft Translator Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/)
• The MIX 09 video introducing the Microsoft Translator (Exposing Web Content to a Global Audience Using Machine Translation,
  Dr. Neil Roodyn, http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/B05M, 24 minutes)
• Microsoft Translator Forum (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/microsofttranslator/threads/)
• Email address for feedback on the Microsoft Translator: mtcont@microsoft.com

As always you should read the terms of use (the terms of use for the REST API are here) but in general they say that these are available for non-commercial use. Commercial licences are available by contacting Microsoft.

In addition Microsoft has a growing collection of implementations of this technology:-

• Microsoft Translator Accelerator For IE8
• Microsoft Translator Installer For Microsoft Office
• Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot

There's a new .NET podcast on the scene. It's called Sod This and it is the quintessential "two blokes and a microphone" podcast straight from Gary's Garage (actually it might have been Oliver's Garage but there's no alliteration in that). Gary Short and Oliver Sturm, the nomadic DevExpress Scottish and German tech evangelists, provide a series of podcasts involving swearing, interviews, abuse, straight talking, Silverlight bashing and a bit more swearing.

Voting for your favourite DDD South West sessions is now open (go here). Voting for your favourites helps us to allocate the largest rooms to the sessions with the highest demand and therefore we can avoid over subscribed sessions. Here's a reminder of the sessions:-

• Everything you Wanted to Know About Refactoring but Were Afraid to Ask (Gary Short)
• Creating extendable applications using MEF (Ben Hall)
• Oslo and the future Microsoft Modelling platform (Robert Hogg)
• Embracing a new world - dynamic languages and .Net (Ben Hall)
• Introduction to Windows Azure (Chris Hay)
• Real-world MVC architecture (Steve Sanderson)
• What is Scrum ? (Richard Fennell)
• A Quantum of Computing (Dave McMahon)
• Silverlight 3 (Richard Costall)
• Express Yourself (Marc Gravell)
• Get Going With jQuery (George Adamson)
• Less Means More With WCF (Jimmy Skowronski)
• Introduction to Video Game Development with XNA (Kris Athi)
• What's New In C# 4 ? (Guy Smith-Ferrier)

Don't forget there's a full Alternative Track of great sessions but as these are all in the same room there is no opportunity to vote for these sessions.

(Note that the voting is just to give us an idea of how popular the sessions are - you aren't committed to anything by choosing one session over another). Voting closes on Thursday 25th April 2009.

MVP, author and international speaker Kathleen Dollard is making a rare visit to the UK and Ireland in June and will be visiting six user groups:-

• Cambridge: The Next Generation User Group (Thursday 18th June 2009)
• Edinburgh: Scottish Developers (Monday 22nd June 2009)
• Glasgow: Scottish Developers (Tuesday 23rd June 2009)
• Dublin: Irish User Group (Wednesday 24th June 2009)
• Galway: Irish User Group (Thursday 25th June 2009)
• Bristol: The .NET Developer Network (Monday 29th June 2009)

The subject for the meeting at The .NET Developer Network in Bristol is open to the public vote (http://www.dotnetdevnet.com/Surveys/tabid/59/Default.aspx) and can be chosen from:-

• Your Application in Pieces - MEF and MAF
• .NET 4.0 Language and IDE Features
• Literals in Visual Basic 9.0 - XML and Text Processing
• The Challenge of Silverlight Architectures
• Cross Coding
• Code Generation
• Windows Presentation Foundation: Beyond the Bling
• Refactoring with Generics
• Rethinking Object Orientation

Full session abstracts are available on the same page. So get voting and we?ll see you in June.

Rupert Murdoch doesn't often get ruffled but recent events in Manchester have the tycoon calling for his closest aides. A few months ago I revealed that a secret leaked NxtGen document showed plans for their Risk-like domination of the UK and all has come true. NxtGen are opening another outpost and this time its in Manchester on Wednesday 20th May 2009 (no doubt they were anxious to get the first event in before DDD South West on Saturday 23rd May 2009) where Andy Wilkinson and Steve Robbins are the latest recruits for the Midlands' fuhrers. Rupert Murdoch probably brushes aside such expansion plans as "just some guys running a few .NET user groups" but he's heard the rumours of The Daily NxtGen and worse still the plans for the Russian TV network NxtSkyGen. If Murdoch is afraid just think how Obama feels.

On a less speculative note I'm sad to say that I won't be doing the grand opening this time as DDD South West is just a few days later and there will be lots to sort out in our land of freedom.

In a long overdue first return to the Southampton chapter of The Next Generation User Group I will be giving the following presentation on internationalizing Silverlight on Thursday 18th June 2009:-

• How To Achieve World(-Ready) Domination In Silverlight
  So you've written your Silverlight application and you want it to work in another language ? Then this session is for you. World-Readiness is all of the work that a developer needs to do to globalize an application and make it localizable (i.e. capable of being localized). Whereas these concepts are well established in Windows Forms and ASP.NET, Silverlight is not only a cut-down version of the .NET Framework but also cross platform and client-side. In this session you will learn how to localize Silverlight applications using .resx files, download culture-specific resources on demand so that users only download resources for the culture they need, understand what System.Globalization types and properties Silverlight does not support and why, what CultureInfo and RegionInfo support you can expect on different operating systems, what the Silverlight installation user experience is for non-English users and what language support you can expect from the Silverlight framework.