As I often receive stuff from friends in not only English, but Chinese, German, Greek, you name it, I sometimes get the feeling of “doh…” as I can’t understand a piece of the document very well. Yeah Windows Live Translator is great, TBot is cute, but I am very happy to learn that Office can do it now as well! :)
Words and phrases work best, as any machine translation. I was surprised to see whole document translation worked fairly well too. (I translated a piece of news from Chinese to English.)
Installing it is easy – just download the installer here. It works for both Office 2003 and Office 2007. The current default in Office is WorldLingo – this installer will update your task pane to use Microsoft Translator as the default translator.
Here are some details for both Office versions:
Office 2007: http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2008/08/06/office-document-translation.aspx
Office 2003: http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2008/08/11/office-2003-setup-instructions.aspx
And I need to get that cool widget for the translator widget for the blog too! :)
Next thing I want, is a device that let someone speak into it and translate to the language of choice…
Ah, imagine the barrier of language doesn’t exist anymore one day… although I have to say I totally enjoy learning 25 different ways of saying hi, so very different, yet so similar.