Microsoft has already tried to compete against Google’s translation tool but only Microsoft Translator has come close to being considered real competition for Google’s popular tool. Even though Microsoft Translator is rather trim and doesn’t offer many possibilities for fine-tuning, it does have several impressive features.
Overall, the interface of Microsoft’s translation app is very minimal. However, the animations that appear when you open the speech or keyboard translation pages are impressive. The translator focuses on the most important features — unlike the relatively complex user interface in Google Translate.
Microsoft’s translator app supports 50 languages via text input. Direct language input is possible with significantly fewer languages available. This is where Google has the lead. In principle, however, the two programs are very similar in how they function: both offer language and text translations and keep an exact list of recent translations.
Microsoft Translator can also provide a live translation function. Although the feature is often less than perfect, it is a plus in Microsoft Translator’s favour. However, the fact that unidirectional translation is not supported means that the languages have to be changed manually in the drop-down menu instead of simply pressing the corresponding button. When entering texts, the user must decide whether to use Cyrillic or Latin characters since a mixture of both isn’t supported.
For short sentences, Microsoft Translator often provides more useful results than competing products. For example, Google tends to translate word-for-word, whereas Microsoft Translator is sometimes able to translate short sentences idiomatically. For longer sentences with complicated expressions, Microsoft’s voice recognition isn’t the best but it is at least very accurate with shorter sentences.