“Microsoft Translator is built on more than a decade of natural-language research at Microsoft. Rather than writing hand-crafted rules to translate between languages, modern translation systems approach translation as a problem of learning the transformation of text between languages from existing human translations and leveraging recent advances in applied statistics and machine learning. So-called “parallel corpora” act as a modern Rosetta Stone in massive proportions, providing word, phrase, and idiomatic translations in context for many language pairs and domains. Statistical modeling techniques and efficient algorithms help the computer attack the problem of decipherment (detecting the correspondences between source and target language in the training data) and decoding (finding the best translation of a new input sentence). Microsoft Translator unites the power of statistical methods with linguistic information to produce models that generalize better and lead to more comprehensible translations. The Microsoft Translator web service can be used in web or client applications on any hardware platform and with any operating system to perform language translation and other language-related operations such as language detection, text to speech, or dictionary. Leveraging industry-standard protocols (SOAP, HTTP, REST, and AJAX), the developer sends source text to the service with a parameter indicating the target language, and the service sends back the translated text for the client or web app to use.”