yelpbingYelp announced today that it will use Microsoft Bing to translate reviews on its iPhone app.

Thanks to Microsoft’s Bing Translator, Yelp will translate either one review, or all reviews, with just one push of a button. There are 15 supported languages: English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, French, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, and Japanese.

Yelp, which will bring the translations to its Android app soon, cautions that the feature will not spit out a perfect translation.

bing11“Although machine-translation is not perfect, it’s a fantastic resource for understanding the overall meaning and context of a review that would otherwise be unavailable to a Yelper who does not speak that language,” Yelp notes in a blog post.

It’s a nice win for Microsoft, which has also helped Twitter with translation tools in the past. This isn’t the first partnership with Yelp, as Microsoft teamed up with the company in May to embed restaurant reviews in the Bing Maps app.

Microsoft is also working on new product called Skype Translator that will translate, in near real-time, words being spoken in different languages on a Skype call — promising to break down language barriers by leveraging years of work by Microsoft in speech recognition and translation.

Microsoft Bing still trails Google in latest U.S. search market share numbers, most recently grabbing 19.2 percent of the market compared to Google’s 67.6 percent.

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