Bing Translator Helps Intel Show You the Future

As part of our continuing focus on innovation, we have been working on a series of projects with Intel Corporation under the umbrella of their ongoing commitment to the future of technology through the Tomorrow Project.

The Tomorrow Project encompasses a breadth of activities, but key among them are essay and fiction writing contests where people from around the world can write their vision of future technology. To kick off the conversations, acclaimed science fiction writers like Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, scientists like Kristi Morgansen (Researcher and maker of robotic fish), Dr. Lawrence Krauss (Physicist & author of The Physics of Star Trek), Andrew Hessel (Genomics and co- futurist founder of the Pink Army Cooperative), and performing artists like will.i.am have contributed their insights and energy to the Tomorrow Project conversations, for a better technological future.

“The Tomorrow Project is a place where we can engage in conversations about the future, about the futures we want, and the futures we want to avoid. By participating in this conversation, each and every one of us can truly have a say, not just in our own future, but in the future of our entire planet,”

said Brian David Johnson, Futurist, Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation.

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Naturally, we couldn’t wait to get involved, and as a first step we offered up our Bing Translator technology to help further the Tomorrow Project’s worldwide outreach. By enabling you to translate the Tomorrow Project web pages into 40+ languages, Bing can help more people around the globe envision the kind of future they want to live in, and communicate with others about the kind of technical changes they would like to see.

Tomorrow Project organizers say the top 5 languages spoken by their visitors include English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Chinese. As the Bing Translator widget spans over 40 languages, it will go a long way toward enabling more folks to participate. Even Klingons!

“We are excited to be working with Intel and supporting the Tomorrow Project with the latest version of the Bing Translator Widget. The integration into the Tomorrow Project site allows you to understand, communicate and collaborate in your native language through the use of real-time machine translation technology delivered right to each web page” said Vikram Dendi, Director of Product Strategy at Microsoft. “You can also help the rest of the community by utilizing the collaborative translation features enabled by the widget, by customizing and proposing your own translations or voting for other translations.”

The Translator Widget allows anyone with a website to copy and paste a code snippet to enable translation. Currently the Bing Translator Widget translates between all of the following languages:

Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Simplified and Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonia, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong Daw, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian. Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese.

For those who are 13-25 years of age and want to take part in the latest Tomorrow Project competition (for a chance to win $1000), learn more on the Future Powered by Fiction home page.What will you imagine next? We can’t wait to find out!

Note: You can find more information hereabout the Bing Translator Widget and get the code to use on your own site.

Betsy Aoki, Senior Program Manager, Bing