Bing Translator from Microsoft: the Best Machine Translator for Your Website?
Hello everyone, my name is Alex and I’m the Founder of Translation Cloud. We’ve just posted a video to YouTube on the pros, cons, limits, and languages of Microsoft’s Bing Translator.
Before watching this video or reading the rest of this post, please check out our last two posts in this series for a great overview of the biggest players in the field of machine translation:
- Machine Translation 2018: Google vs. Bing vs. Yandex
- Yandex Translator: Pros, Cons, Limits, and Languages
Bing Translator is a statistical machine translator which offers partial neural machine translation as well. Microsoft is famous for its operating systems, its software, and its search engine, Bing. Around 2010 they also developed their own machine translator to better compete against Google, Yandex, and the like.
Strengths and weaknesses of Bing Translator.
What makes Bing Translator unique over its competitors is that it offers partial support of neural translation networks, meaning the quality seems to be better than the previous generation (statistical machine translation), and therefore it benefits linguists and business owners looking for a cost-effective translation opportunity. In fact, Bing Translator is one of the most affordable options on the market, charging only $10 per 1 million characters (or approximately 500 pages of text). If you’re developing your own plugin or other application, you can better leverage the quality of the neural language translation network with the affordability of the service.
At Translation Cloud, we have experimented with all three technologies from Yandex, Bing, and Google, and we found Bing to be the most cost effective, even though it lacks support for the number of languages that the other two services provide (only 60, compared to 95 from Yandex and over 100 from Google).
Additionally, Bing Translator comes with a free tier, which Google Translate no longer provides. If your application is relatively small, you can translate up to 2 million characters free of charge. For example, we used this free tier technology to power our famous BadTranslator.com, which was recently renamed to FunnyTranslator.com, because we offer the service free of charge to our users for amusement purposes.
Other benefits.
Bing Translator has its own ecosystem. It’s been greatly integrated into Azure Cloud, Microsoft’s cloud platform for deploying web servers and software applications. Web developers can register on the platform and grab their API key to integrate into their web application or CMS. Bing offers 60 languages as well as an online translator interface to copy and paste text from one language to another, free of charge.
Additionally, Bing provides a free website translation widget that helps website owners build a multilingual content website, and therefore more accessible to a larger number of users.
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