Microsoft Translator adds Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada as new languages.

Microsoft Translation team’s ongoing mission to break down language barriers continues with the addition of five languages of India: Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada. These five languages are widely used in different regions of India and around the world by a large Indian diaspora.

The Microsoft Translator team continuously improves translation quality based on technology advancements and usage signals. Neural machine translation technology has recently achieved impressive quality gains, characterized by highly fluent and accurate output. Using multilingual neural machine learning, the Translator team has leveraged data from languages belonging to the same family to build and refine these models and greatly enhance their quality. With this release, Microsoft Translator now translates ten languages of the Indian subcontinent covering 90% of commonly used languages in India.

These languages are available now on all Microsoft Translator apps, add-ins, Bing Translator, Microsoft Office and through the Azure Cognitive Services Translator API for businesses and developers. They will also be rolled out to the new Microsoft Edge browser and other Microsoft products in the coming days.

Details about these languages

Marathi (pronounced məˈrati) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 83 million people in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The language has some of the oldest literature of all modern Indian languages, dating from around 600 AD, written in Devanagari script. The release of this languages happens to coincide closely with formation day of the state of Maharashtra, which is the 1^st of May. Find out more about Marathi here.

Gujarati (pronouncedˌɡuːdʒəˈrɑːti) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 55 million people in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is the official language in the state, as well as in the neighboring territories of Dadra, Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu. The Gujarati language uses the Abugida script. The release of Gujarati also happens to coincide closely with the formation day of the state of Gujarat as well, which is also the 1^st of May. Find out more about Gujarati here.

Punjabi (pronounced pʌnˈdʒɑːbi) is an Indo-Aryan language with more than 33 million native speakers in the Indian subcontinent and around the world. It is the predominant language in the Indian state of Punjab. Our machine translation is trained on content in the Gurmukhi script, which is the official script for the Punjabi language in India. We wish people of Punjab Happy and Safe Baisakhi and hope this release helps to reduce communication  barriers. Find out more about Punjabi here.

Malayalam (pronounced muh·lyaa·luhm) is a Dravidian language spoken by approximately 37 million people in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry.  Malayalam script is based on the Vatteluttu script . We wish the people of Kerala Happy and Safe Vishu and hope this release helps to reduce communication barriers. Find out more about Malayalam here.

Kannada (pronounced kanədə) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the 44 million people in Indian state of Karnataka. The Kannada language is written using the Kannada script, which evolved from the 5th-century Kadamba script. Find out more about Kannada here.

What you can do with Microsoft Translator

Translate real-time conversations, menus and street signs, websites, documents and more using the Translator app for Windows, iOS, Android and the web.

Neural machine translation models for these newly supported languages are now available as part of the Microsoft Translator API, a member of the Azure Cognitive Services family. Use these services to build translation solutions to help globalize your business and improve customer interactions.

Create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-language understanding.

For more information on Microsoft Translator please visit: http://approjects.co.za/?big=translator/.