Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot Released

Do you chat globally? If so, you’ll be glad to hear that the Microsoft Translator team has just released a new translation bot for Windows Live Messenger.  With this new bot, you can IM back and forth with friends who speak different languages while the bot does the translations for you. To use the new bot, just add mbot@hotmail.com to your contact list. Keep in mind that machine translation isn’t perfect – using slang or other colloquialisms can give it trouble.

At the moment, the translation bot support the following languages:

• English to/from:
  • Arabic
  • Chinese Simplified
  • Chinese Traditional
  • Dutch
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Portuguese
  • Russian (RUS->ENU only)
  • Spanish
• Chinese Simplified <-> Chinese Traditional

More languages will be added over the next few months.

The team also suggests that the bot can be used in WLM on your smartphone for quick translations when you’re traveling in foreign countries. Not a bad idea, considering nearly all smartphones today can support Windows Live Messenger (if your phone doesn’t have WLM already installed, you can download it from here or you can get all the mobile tools from here).