Microsoft has announced the availability of its Translator Hub, an innovative tool developed by Microsoft Research to harness machine learning and unleash its potential for customizing language translation.

Built on Windows Azure, Microsoft Translator Hub is an extension of the Microsoft Translator platform and service. Up until now it has been restricted to a few early partners but now it is commercially available, as announced at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference on July 11th.

According to Vikram Dendi, who runs business strategy and product planning for the Microsoft Translator group:

The users of the Hub can upload parallel (same document in two languages) and monolingual (single language) documents in a variety of formats, and build custom translation models in a private workspace using Microsoft Translator’s machine learning based training systems. The Hub provides methods and a simple user interface for collaborating and improving the translation system with reviewers, before deploying to the Microsoft Translator runtime infrastructure. The owner of the customized system can keep the system private, share it with other individuals, companies, or make it available publicly.

Earlier this year Translator showcased the ability of this big-data machine learning approach to translation with the addition of the Hmong language to Bing Translator as a result of the translation engine being trained using these new methods.

Watch this video for a gentle introduction to getting started with Translator Hub:

If you are interested in the Translator Hub you can request an invitation from its portal.