New version of Microsoft Terminology API launched

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Today, the Microsoft Terminology API is being expanded with a much broader set of language combinations as well as new settings for case sensitivity.

If you are developing apps for a global audience, you will now be able to create your apps for Windows Store, Windows Phone and regular Windows desktop applications using the terminology and user interface (UI) strings available on the Microsoft Language Portal between all 100+ languages currently translated for Windows and Office. Till now, the API only provided searches to and from English, but with today's enhancements, developers can now translate, for example, from Spanish to French or vice versa, Japanese to Chinese, Russian to Kazakh, and so on.

And if you’re already using Microsoft’s light-weight XLIFF editor, the Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT), to localize your apps, the good news is that the any-to-any language feature is already integrated in MAT so no additional coding is required. Read more about how this is integrated into MAT on the Multilingual App Toolkit team blog.

Here are the highlights of the new version:

  • Support for “any-to-any” language translation searches, e.g. Japanese to/from French or any other language combination. In the previous version of the API, searching was restricted to either en-us to a target language (e.g. English to Japanese), or to en-us from a source language (e.g. Japanese to English).
  • Another improvement is the ability to filter searches with string case and hotkey sensitivity. A new parameter in the GetTranslations method allows specifying the sensitivity level. For example, the CaseSensitive operator allows you to find “Cat”, but not “CAT” or “cat” if you wish to find results for the animal felis catus, but not translations of the concept Computer Aided Translation (abbreviated CAT). This option will be added to the Multilingual App Toolkit soon.
  • It’s now also possible to filter out undesirable string results due to hotkeys (which are typically indicated in a string by using the ampersand (&)). So in this way, you can choose to ignore (or match) strings with hotkeys, such as “&Cat”. This option will also be added to the Multilingual App Toolkit soon.

The data on the Microsoft Language Portal represents Microsoft’s core terminology and millions of user interface translation pairs in over 100 languages. Together with the Microsoft Translator machine translation system, it feeds the Multilingual App Toolkit for integrated app localization.

You’ll find full details about these new features in the updated Terminology Service API SDK.