A new volume pricing model has been announced for Microsoft Translator - although it will still be free for low-volume and hobbyist use.

In his keynote at the Build conference, Microsoft President Satya Nadella included news of Microsoft Translator.

The service now supports the Open Data Protocol (OData) for querying and updating data. OData applies web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores and is now alongside SOAP, HTTP and AJAX as available interfaces.

Developers are now also to use OAuth, the standards- based, two-stage, authentication protocol to secure calls to API (irrespective of the end point they are using).

The new pricing model caters for developers who expect to use it extensively and there's still a free tier for low-volume users:

Developers can now sign up for the any one of these levels - including the Free one that provides 2000 transactions per month at the Windows Azure Marketplace.

One obvious question is how does this pricing structure compare to that for Google Translate. In fact it is difficult to do the comparison as Google is charging by the character at $20 per million characters while Microsoft is charging by the transaction. Google estimates that its charge works out at 5 cents per page assuming 500 words per page; Microsoft's charge works out at 10 cents per transaction - but its page could be larger as the limit is 100 records per page. Microsoft is offering a one-month free trial which gives the opportunity of working out what level of service you need.

More information:

Microsoft Translator news on MSDN Blog

See also:

Google Translate revived - but as a paid-for API

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