Frequently Asked Questions about Machine Translation

What is Machine Translation?

It is a service that allows those customers who do not understand English to query the more than 200,000 articles available in English and automatically translated without human intervention using internal technology from Microsoft Research. These articles are therefore 100% translated by a machine. No humans look at them.

How can I know if an article has been Machine Translated?

Within each Machine Translated article, there is a sentence that will tell you that the article has been automatically translated. We also provide you with a hyperlink to the US source article. This is an example:

NOTE: Thank you for using the Machine Translation System. This article has been translated by a computer system without any human intervention. Microsoft offers these articles, as they are, to the users that don't understand English so that they can understand them easier. Microsoft is not responsible for the linguistic quality of the translations or the technical accuracy of the contents, nor of any problem, direct or indirect that could arise from the usage that the customers do of this technology.

Click Here to see the US Source article (in English): 825750

All the Machine Translated articles will be identified in the search results by the following icon:

This is an example:

How can I Activate/Deactivate the Machine Translation Service?

In the Advance Search page of the Microsoft KB (http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1) you have the option to deactivate the Machine Translation Articles by unchecking the checkbox Include Machine Translation Articles. If you do so, all the search results will be limited to the humanly translated articles, although the number of articles will be considerably diminished since Microsoft only translated a limited number of all available articles.

How can I check the US source article?

You can always access the US original article to help you understand the translation. Below the note that mentions that an article has been Machine Translated you will find a KB number and the text Click here to see the US source article (in English).

For example Click here to see the US source article (in English):825750

The translation is not as good as I would like. Is it going to improve?

These Machine Translated articles, for obvious reasons, have a much lower quality than the articles professionally translated by humans; however, you would be able to get many more results as a result of including Machine Translated articles as part of your search. Although the Machine Translation technology has improved greatly in the last years, it still produces linguistic and technical errors. However, the quality of the translation is often good enough to help you solve your problems. Even so, we keep on working to improve the translations by incorporating new Translation Memories and glossaries as well as making regular upgrades to the Machine Translation Engine to improve its quality.

When I click an article, does it get translated in real time?

No, the articles are already translated and live in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. They are not translated in Real Time. However, they do get updated very often.