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Windows Live Translator is the name of Microsoft's new free service (currently in beta) which lets you translate text from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, and vice versa in some cases. You can either have a text of up to 500 words translated or you can translate an entire web page.
Yes, in case you were wondering, it's basically the same thing as Google's language tools, only with less options and languages to choose from. While there's nothing wrong with Microsoft contributing in this area, I can't help the feeling that their Windows Live services are always years behind the competition.
As far as the actual quality of the translation goes, Microsoft uses Systran's well known engine (Google is also using it), but also offers the option of using their own in-house machine translation service which works well with computer-related texts. It's hard to objectively test how good Microsoft's translator really is, but based on a couple of paragraph of text I've fed it, I wasn't impressed enough to declare it much (or any) better than Google's translation service.
[via Google Operating System]