The tool Microsoft Translator is offered as part of Microsoft’s search engine Bing and so operates under the name of Bing Translator. With its clear, comprehensive, and advert-free user interface, users can translate entire websites as well as groups of sentences of up to 5,000 characters. The highly functional tool operates in 60 languages, including exotic ones like the native Mexican Querétaro Otomí, the east-Asian Hmong Daw, and the fictional science fiction language Klingon. As a free alternative to Google Translate, Microsoft Translator also offers additional translation suggestions with synonyms. When translating complete sentences or documents, the program delivers comprehensive and surprisingly high-quality results. Anyone who registers online or downloads the mobile app can also access the ‘Speech API’ for chats – a real-time translator which allows for multilingual conversations. The app also offers the opportunity to download individual language packs for offline use.
One of Microsoft Translator’s most notable features, and in a way makes it better than Google Translate, is the ‘Try & Compare’ function, which works via a neural network. This free additional feature allows you to review and compare complex terms and longer sentences in up to 10 different languages. This makes for a significantly more accurate translation. The supported languages are Arabic, ‘Chinese Simplified’, German, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Artificial intelligence-supported special functions review the word-by-word context of a sentence, not just algorithmically, but also through a more complex language recognition based on grammatical peculiarities. This makes the translation substantially more ‘organic’ compared to other translation programs. Professional clients also have the option of purchasing a more extensive business version of Microsoft Translator.
Many of the major and most popular dictionaries in the English-speaking world like Collins and Oxford dictionaries offer a translation function, which is actually ‘powered by Microsoft’. This shows the extent to which Microsoft Translator is trusted and respected as an alternative to Google Translate.
Conclusion: Anyone searching for a comprehensive Google Translate alternative can go very far with the Microsoft Translator – as it automatically translates phrases and entire websites, has access to a huge range of languages, and contains an AI-supported additional feature.