China, Microsoft, and Translation
June 18th, 2005I’ve been following the story about Microsoft’s latest adventure in China with some interest, but it really wasn’t until I read the latest post at Global Voices that I saw that this story is directly related to a topic I’ve been sort of obsessed with lately, what I think of as “ the wall of translation .”
If you missed the story, basically what’s happened is that Microsoft is cooperating with China’s censorship of MSN Spaces blogs and blocking words like “democracy” and “human rights” in the way some blogging systems block words like “fuck.”
I’m glad mine doesn’t. 
Anyway, what I mean by the “ wall of translation ” is that this is a story where a dialog could take place on a large scale between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking bloggers (or speakers of any language, really), if there were an effective mechanism for that translation to take place.
But the conversation hits a wall, because the connections and routines that make translation happen aren’t public.
Presumably some day machine translation will solve that problem. But that day isn’t today. And despite what Google says, I don’t think it’s going to come within in the next few years.
People need to think about this problem, a lot, because it must be solved.
I think about it.
A lot.
Hi! I heard, that as it was expected, Microsoft on Thursday released the last publicly-available preview to Office 2007.
Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh, which weighs in at 495MB from the Redmond, Wash. company’s Download Center, had been anticipated for weeks by testers. Users must have Beta 2 of the upcoming application suite already installed on their systems, said Microsoft, which is taking advantage of the situation to also test the Office 2007 patching technology and back end support.
Technical Refresh (TR) is the only version of Office 2007 that will run properly under Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1), the nearer-to-final test edition of the operating system Microsoft released to the public last week.
Although the TR is free of charge to Beta 2 users, “anyone not currently on Beta 2 will need to download Beta 2 before they are able to download the Technical Refresh,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “So those customers will have to pay $1.50 to download the beta first.”
Microsoft slapped the download fee on Office 2007 Beta 2 early last month after more than 3 million had grabbed the preview. Then, it called the $1.50 charge “a cost recovery measure.”
The TR includes performance improvements, bug fixes, fit and finish enhancements, and according to Jensen Harris, a lead program manager on the Office team, more than 1,000 changes to the Office interface’s newest graphical element, the Ribbon. “The UI [user interface] is now totally feature complete, and you will see only cosmetic differences between B2TR and the final version in most areas,” Harris wrote Wednesday in a blog entry.
Microsoft has set prices for the new application suite, but has been coy about a launch date, saying only that it plans to put the program in corporate users’ hands by the end of this year, and ship it to others in early 2007. Last month, Amazon.com began taking pre-orders for the product, and listed January 30, 2007 as the ship date.
Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh can be downloaded from this page on the Microsoft site.
- Tom @ 15 September 2006Hi everybody!
Can the open source software movement defeat (or severely cripple) Microsoft in the marketplace?
- Tom @ 18 September 2006Hopefully it does!
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