credit: Photo of Beit ed-Dine in Lebanon by Oida666 from Wikimedia Commons

Levantine, our 11^th speech language, is a spoken dialect of Arabic which has over 32 million native speakers.  Since it’s a spoken language that is rarely written, it lacks the large amount of parallel data required to train a usable machine translation system. As with any AI system, without the appropriate amount of data to train the neural machine translation model, the system won’t be able to produce translations that are good enough for real-life use.

However, our researchers developed a novel approach which utilizes monolingual data to train a system for any spoken dialect. This allowed the team to build a working Levantine to English translation system despite this lack of parallel data.

“We adapted a system trained on standard Arabic-to-English translation to be used on a spoken Arabic dialect (Levantine) using only monolingual data of the spoken dialect. We developed an approach to generate synthetic parallel data from monolingual data.” – Hany-Hassan Awadalla, Principal Research Scientist 

Levantine is now available as a supported speech translation language through the Translator apps, Presentation Translator for PowerPoint, the Skype Translator feature in Skype for Windows 10, and the unified Speech translation service, an Azure Cognitive Service. With this service, developers can also customize speech transcriptions, translations, and text-to-speech, before integrating them into their apps, workflows, and websites.

Recently, Microsoft has partnered with the No Lost Generation Tech Task Force, led by NetHope, and one of its members – Norwegian Refugee Council – to co-create an AI-powered solution linking youth affected by Syrian and Iraqi conflicts with educational resources. Their goal is to enable conflict-affected youth to discover and access learning resources anywhere and anytime.

“Many of the conflict-affected youth lack access to learning resources which restricts their opportunities for higher education and dignified work. Levantine support in Microsoft Translator opens up opportunities for them to learn in their native language through real-time translation of online courses and remote mentoring.” – Leila Toplic, NLG Tech Task Force Lead, NetHope

Start and join live, multilingual conversations with up to 100 people

Using the Translator app’s live conversation feature, users can have live, real-time conversations with people who speak other languages, on their own device, in their chosen language.

Let’s say you’re a Lebanese business person travelling to Italy and want to have a conversation with an Italian partner. You can speak Levantine into your phone or PC, and the Levantine audio will be translated into Italian text and speech on your partner’s phone or PC. This also works in reverse: the Italian speaker can speak into their device and have real-time multilingual conversations, and the listener receives the response in Arabic. This scenario is not limited to two devices or two languages. It can support up to 100 devices, across 11 speech translation languages, and over 60 text translation languages. To learn more about the Translator live feature go to http://translate.it or watch this how-to video.

Use your phone as a personal, Levantine translator

Levantine speakers can also have translated, bilingual conversations using only one device by tapping the microphone icon and using the split-screen conversation feature in the app.  Simply select your speech languages, German and Levantine for instance, and use the app’s microphone button to speak in your chosen language. Translated text appears on the split-screen in each language.

Download the Microsoft Translator app.

Present in PowerPoint in Levantine and add translated subtitles in over 60 languages

Presentation Translator allows users to offer live, subtitled presentations straight from PowerPoint. As you speak, the add-in powered by the Microsoft Translator live feature, allows you to display subtitles directly on your PowerPoint presentation in any one of more than 60 supported text languages. This feature can also be used for audiences who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Additionally, up to 100 audience members in the room can follow along with the presentation in their own language, including the speaker’s language, on their phone, tablet or computer. This can also be used with the presenter’s language to support accessibility scenarios.

For example, if you’re presenting to a Levantine speaking audience and speak Spanish, you can choose Spanish as your speech translation language, and Arabic as the subtitle language. As you speak Spanish, your words will get translated to Arabic subtitling in real-time on the screen.

Levantine speakers can now also join and use their phone to ask questions, in Levantine, once the presenter unmutes the audience. This feature is useful for Q&A sessions after a presentation.

If there are audience members who speak other languages, they can follow along with the presentation in their chosen language in the Translator app or at http://translate.it.

API for Developers: Speech translations with the unified Speech services (preview)

Levantine is also available for developers through the Azure Cognitive Services Speech service.  In addition to using the default speech translation models from Levantine, developers can also customize speech transcriptions and translation models using the Custom Speech (http://customspeech.ai) and Custom Translator (http://customtranslator.ai) services.

Developers can then easily integrate speech translation into their apps using the new speech SDK available in several popular programming languages.

To learn more about Microsoft Translator for business, visit the Microsoft Translator site.

The post Microsoft Translator launches Levantine Arabic as a new speech translation language appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Microsoft Translator is excited to announce the launch of our latest AI-powered text translation language: Icelandic. It is the first publicly available neural machine translation (NMT) system.

Building this system  was a significant technical challenge for the research team due to the limited amount of available training data.

To achieve the required translation quality, the team tested and relied on several innovative approaches, some new to NMT, and some derived from other work done for other languages.

The Icelandic system used a training technique similar to the one used in this ground breaking research project. Using this technique, the team was able to improve translation quality by generating additional training data from monolingual data translated with the initial translation system.

Although seemingly counter intuitive at first, the NMT system was able to use the massive amounts of translated data created by this machine translated data to retrain the system. It produced a significant increase in translation quality measured by the industry standard BLEU score, and by human evaluations. Additional techniques were employed to help improve the final system quality, such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), a technique initially developed for data compression purposes.

The support of Icelandic in Microsoft Translator was highly recognized by the Icelandic president, Mr. Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, who visited Microsoft headquarters in connection to his trip to Seattle for the opening of the Nordic Museum.

Icelandic is now available on all Microsoft Translator apps, add-ins, Office, Translator for Bing, and through the Azure Cognitive Services Translator API for developers.

Communicating to and from Icelandic: Apps & Add-Ins

Learn how to start communicating to and from Icelandic through our apps and add-ins below.

Microsoft Translator Apps

Available on Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, and Windows 10 devices, the Microsoft Translator app supports the following use cases.

Text translation. Type or paste text and translate it in over 60 text translation languages.

Multi-person conversation translation using the live feature. While traveling abroad, you can have live real-time conversations with people who speak other languages, on your own device, in your chosen language. Let’s say you speak one of Microsoft Translator’s ten speech translation languages, such as Spanish, and want to have a conversation with an Icelandic speaker. You can speak Spanish into your phone, and the Spanish audio will be translated into Icelandic text on the other person’s device. This also works in reverse: the Icelandic speaker can type* into their device and reply to the conversation, and the Spanish speaker receives the response in Spanish. This scenario is not limited to two devices or two languages. It can support up to 100 devices across 10 speech translation languages and over 60 text translation languages. To learn more about the Translator live feature go to http://translate.it

Translate websites on Safari using the Microsoft Translator browser extension for iOS. When you download the Translator app on iOS, you automatically have access to the Safari translation add-in. Open safari, tap Settings, and choose your Safari Translation Language. After choosing your language, open any localized website in Safari, tap the Share button, and the Microsoft Translator icon to translate the web content.

Translate text directly in other apps using the contextual text translation extension for Android. There’s no need to switch to the Translator app to translate text in Android. If you have the Translator app downloaded onto your device, this feature will automatically translate text within other apps where the “Share” feature is available. Simply highlight the text, tap the Share button, and tap the Microsoft Translator icon to see the translation.

Download the app on  Android, iOS, or Windows 10.

Presentation Translator for PowerPoint (Windows only)

PowerPoint users can now display live, translated subtitles in Icelandic by speaking in one of the 10 supported speech translation languages. Presentation Translator for PowerPoint gives audience members the opportunity to follow along on their own device, in their chosen text language. Download and learn more.

Translator for Outlook add-in

Translate email messages to and from Icelandic across devices using an Outlook.com or Office365 email address. Read our blog for a complete list of features, and download the add-in here.

Translator for Microsoft Edge

Translate web pages from or to Icelandic across over 60 other languages using the Microsoft Edge Translator extension. Download the extension here.

Translator for Microsoft Word

Translate entire Word documents into over 60 text translation languages by selecting the “translate” icon from the “review” tab of the ribbon. The translated text will show up in a new Word document and will maintain its original formatting, including tracked changes and comments! Learn how to start using Translator for Microsoft Word.

Translator for Bing

Translate text and entire websites into Icelandic directly in your browser with Translator for Bing.

Icelandic translation for businesses and developers

The Microsoft Translator API helps integrate translation support for any solution across all sectors from manufacturing, retail, gaming, education, financial services, government services, and many more.

Part of Azure Cognitive Services, the Microsoft Translator API is used by businesses worldwide for web localization and e-commerce, internal communication, customer support, and business intelligence.

This week, we launched the latest version of the Translator Text API, version 3, which comes with other Translator product releases:

• The custom feature allows for not only customized text translation, but speech translation as well. With as few as 2,000 parallel sentences, i.e. human generated translations, you can begin customizing your translations.
• A preview of the new unified Cognitive Services Speech which combines the capabilities of the existing Translator Speech API, Bing Speech API, and Custom Speech Service in a unified and fully customizable set of services: speech to text, translation, and text-to-speech

To learn more about Microsoft Translator for business, visit the Microsoft Translator business site.

*Icelandic speech to text not yet available.

The post Microsoft Translator adds Icelandic as a supported language appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Today, Microsoft Translator announces the availability of its 10^th speech translation language: Japanese. This new language is now available across all Microsoft Translator supported technologies and products along with the already released nine other speech translation languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Microsoft Translator is the first end-to-end speech translation solution optimized for real-life conversations (vs. simple human to machine commands) available on the market. It is one of the services in Microsoft’s portfolio of artificial intelligence technologies designed to make AI accessible to all.

Speech translation is a hard problem to solve, as is always the case when machines are trying to mimic a deeply human capability.  It uses two neural-network based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies: Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation. It also uses a unique natural language processing technology (TrueText) and a speech synthesizer, aka “Text to Speech”, which enables users to hear, and not only read, the translation.

These technologies are then connected to perform the speech translation function:

1. The sound is transcribed into text through the speech recognition AI
2. TrueText then processes this text to remove unnecessary speech elements, such as redundant words or fillers like “um” (English) or “eto” (Japanese), that would generate poor translations
3. The machine translation AI then translates each word using the context of the full sentence
4. Finally, the text to speech generates the audio output from this translated text

With this release, businesses, developers, and end users alike will be able to use Japanese in the various apps and services offered or powered by Microsoft Translator:

• For presentations, meetings or any other multi-devices translation use cases with the Microsoft Translator live feature. This personal universal translator feature is available at http://translate.it and on the Windows, Android,  iOS, and Amazon Fire Translator apps
• Microsoft Translator API for developers to add speech translation to their applications
• The Skype Translator feature in Skype for Windows desktop and the
  Windows 10 Skype Preview app to call between Skype clients or from Skype to any phone number in the world with a Skype Out subscription (available in the Skype Preview app only)

You can translate any of the supported 10 Translator speech languages into any of the supported 60+ Translator text languages.

In addition to the availability of Japanese as a speech translation language, starting today, all text translations from English to Japanese (and vice-versa) in Microsoft products and services will exclusively use these new and improved neural network translations system. Whether you translate a webpage in Edge, an email in Outlook, or a simple sentence on www.bing.com/translator, all of your translations will be performed with our state of the art neural network systems.

Read more about this news in our Microsoft Japan blog (in Japanese)

Learn More

• What is machine translation?
• Microsoft Translator Speech API
• Microsoft Translator apps
• Microsoft Translator FAQ
• Microsoft Cognitive Services

The post Japanese becomes the 10th speech translation language supported by Microsoft Translator appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Last year Microsoft announced the release of its Neural Network based translation system for 10 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Today, Korean is being added to the list.

Neural Network translation uses the full context of a sentence to translate words based not only on a few words before and after it, but on the full sentence, generating more fluent and more human sounding translations. This new AI-powered technology delivers the most significant improvement in machine translation quality since statistical machine translation became the industry standard 10 years ago.

Thanks to these improvements in quality and fluency, translations are the closest they have ever been to human generated ones.

HOW IT WORKS

At a high level, Neural Network translation works in two stages:

1. The first stage models the word that needs to be translated based on the context of this word (and its possible translations) within the full sentence, whether the sentence is 5 words or 20 words long.
2. The second stage then translates this word model (not the word itself but the model the neural network has built), within the context of the sentence, into the other language.

Neural Network translation uses models of word translations based on what it knows from both languages about a word and the sentence context to find the most appropriate word as well as the most suitable position for this translated word in the sentence.

One way to think about neural network-based translation is to think of a fluent English and French speaker that would read the word “dog” in a sentence: “The dog is happy”. This would create in his or her brain the image of a dog. This image would be associated with “le chien” in French. The Neural Network would intrinsically know that the word “chien” is masculine in French (“le” not “la”). But, if the sentence were to be “the dog just gave birth to six puppies”, it would picture the same dog with puppies nursing and then automatically use “la chienne” (female form of “le chien”) when translating the sentence.

Here’s an example of the benefits of this new technology used in the following sentence: (one of the randomly proposed on our try and compare site: http://translate.ai)

M277dw에 종이 문서를 올려놓고, 스마트폰으로 스캔 명령을 내린 뒤 해당 파일을 스마트폰에 즉시 저장할 수 있다.

Traditional Statistical Machine Translation would offer this translation:

“M277dw, point to the document, the paper off the file scan command Smartphone smartphones can store immediately.”

Neural Network translation, in comparison, generates this clear and fluent sentence:

“You can place a paper document on M277DW, and then save the file to your smartphone immediately after the scan command.”

The Neural Network translation systems are available for you to use through many entry points:

• Browser: We’d love your feedback on the new Neural Network Korean translation system vs. the legacy statistical one! Visit our try & compare site: http://translate.ai
• Microsoft Translator live feature: When using our new personal universal communicator feature, Microsoft Translator live, neural translations will also be used. For instance, if you use this feature to translate a live presentation from any of the nine supported speech languages to any of the 11 NN-powered translation systems, subtitles will be delivered using Neural Network technology: http://translate.it 
• Instant Messages in Skype: Translate instant messages (from and to any of these 11 languages) using the Skype Translator feature in Skype desktop and Skype Preview for Windows 10.

In addition, developers can easily integrate Microsoft Translator Neural Network systems by using the category “generalnn” in their API calls. There is no extra cost in using our neural network models vs. the existing statistical ones so don’t hesitate to use them!

For speech translation projects, the Microsoft Translator speech API already uses neural network translations from any of our 9 speech translation languages to all the 11 neural network powered languages.

Learn More:

How Neural Network translation works?
Microsoft Translator live feature: the personal universal translator
Microsoft Translator apps
Microsoft AI

The post Korean Becomes Microsoft Translator’s 11th Neural Network Translation Language appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Microsoft is proud to be a major sponsor of AMTA 2014. The conference, held from October 22-26 in Vancouver, BC, is a great opportunity to hear about the most current developments and trends in Machine Translation (aka Automatic Translation) and to meet and share your ideas with people deeply involved in and passionate about it.

The main conference, October 23-25, is organized into three tracks you can select sessions from: Research, Commercial, and Government. In addition to the main conference, a series of three-hour tutorials and full-day workshops will be presented on Wednesday (October 22) and Sunday (October 26).

For more information on the conference and venue and to register visit http://amta2014.amtaweb.org.

We hope to see you in Vancouver!

The post Microsoft Sponsors AMTA 2014 appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

This release provides several key fixes as well as new and improved features including:

• Visual Studio Online builds
• Expanded import, export and recycling
• Improved translation and suggestion results
• As well as a number of key fixes

The MAT team really focused on key features as well as addressing both reported and non-reported issues in this release. A huge congratulations to the MAT team and their great work delivering this latest release!

Please note that due to updates to the setup process, you will need to perform a one-time uninstall of MAT v3.0 or earlier before installing v3.1.

Get Started Using MAT Today

• Multilingual App Toolkit Team Announcement 
• BUILD Conference Session
• Multilingual App Toolkit on Windows Dev Center
• How to Use the Multilingual App Toolkit
• Introduction to the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Build multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Test multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit
• Localize multi-language apps using the Multilingual App Toolkit 
• Submitting your localized app to the Windows Store

The post Multilingual App Toolkit 3.1 Launched – Localize Your App, Extend Your Reach appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

During Nadella’s conversation with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the Re/code tech website relating to a new era of personal computing, he asked Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Lync and Skype, to join him on stage. While on stage, Pall demonstrated for the first time publicly the Skype Translator app, with Pall conversing in English with German-speaking Microsoft employee Diana Heinrichs.

Watch the Demo

Your browser does not support iframes.

Speech has been a natural evolution of the translation work that Microsoft has been delivering to consumers and businesses across a broad number of products and solutions. The work represents over a decade of work within Microsoft Research that has become a reality through a series of remarkable research advances in translation, speech recognition, and language processing. This demonstration is the next step in delivering the real time speech translation experience to users that Rick Rashid, then the worldwide head of Microsoft Research, demonstrated a year and a half ago.

The Skype Translator app will available first on Windows 8 later this year as a limited beta.

It has been an exciting day as we unveil this remarkable technology advancement that brings people one step closer to removing barriers of communication regardless of language or location!

Learn More about Skype Translator

• Skype Translator from Microsoft Video
• TechNet Blog Post from Gurdeep Pall, Corporate Vice President of Skype and Lync at Microsoft
• Microsoft Research Feature Story: Enabling Cross-Lingual Conversations in Real Time
• Code Conference Coverage of the Demo

The post Unveiling Breakthroughs in Real-Time Translation with Skype Translator appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Using the plugin, visitors can translate a site into any of the 40+ supported languages in one click without leaving the page once this light-weight, cross-browser plugin is installed. This plugin also provides options for a setting a color scheme, as well as an option to allow visitors to suggest translations.

The Bing Translator plugin should be installed from within the WordPress Dashboard by clicking on Plugins >Add New and search for “Bing Translator” and works on any WordPress site. A site developer can also manually install the plugin by downloading it from WordPress.org, then adding the “bing-translator” folder in the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory.

Using Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress Video

More Links to Get Started

• Blog Post from Microsoft Open Technologies
• Translator Plugin Site on WordPress.org
• Installing & Configuring the Bing Translator for WordPress
• Using the Bing Translator for WordPress
• Adding Bing Translator to WordPress using WordPress Widgets
• Adding Bing Translator to WordPress using Shortcodes
• Adding Bing Translator to WordPress using PHP Template Tags

Congratulations to Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc team for their great work on the Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress! 

The post Bing Translator Plugin for WordPress Enables Webmasters and Developers to Localize Site Content appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Advancements in technology to support and preserve languages create greater awareness of the linguistic and cultural traditions celebrated throughout the world, which in turn promote understanding, tolerance and dialogue. Helping to enable business, communities, and consumers to communicate and collaborate across language barriers through technology innovation is a core focus for the Microsoft Translator team.  

As part of that focus, Microsoft Translator is announcing Welsh as a new supported language in partnership with the National Assembly for Wales and leveraging the Microsoft Translator Hub. The Welsh language today becomes the latest to join a growing list of languages to benefit from translation services provided by Microsoft Translator.

In 2012, the National Assembly passed the Official Language Act into law, which placed a statutory duty on the Assembly Commission to treat both languages on the basis of equality. 

The Assembly’s Presiding Officer, Dame Rosemary Butler, said:  “One of my key roles is to ensure that all the people of Wales are able to engage with the Assembly’s work, whether through the Welsh or English language. That’s why we have been working with Microsoft to create an automatic language translation system to help the Assembly to meet our own language goals.”

Machine translation is a key part of the Assembly’s commitment to delivering a fully bilingual institution where businesses and services can be delivered through the Welsh and English languages. Users can now translate to and from Welsh using the breadth of Microsoft products including: Office, Bing Translator as well as in the Bing Translator applications for Windows Phone and Windows. 

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeHcZEd7VEo]

 In addition to backend service updates to the Microsoft Translator API, new updates have been released for Windows and Windows Phone Translator apps which include: 

• Offline Language Packs for Polish and Turkish
• Availability of Polish, Czech, Turkish, Greek and Hungarian in Camera Mode
• Addition of Welsh and Maltese in Keyboard Mode
• Release of Wide Tile for Windows Phone

 To further commemorate IMLD, the Microsoft Local Language Program, a part of Microsoft YouthSpark, announced the Language Toolbox, an additional resource to the Microsoft Language Portal (LLP), serving as a consolidated inventory of free language resources and tools provided by Microsoft to help bridge the gap between language and technology. You can read more about this new resource here. 

At Microsoft, we are excited that the continued advancements of machine translation features and functionality are enabling users to achieve a shared understanding and make the world a little smaller every day.

To Learn More 

• National Assembly for Wales Machine Translation Site 
• National Assembly for Wales Blog
• Video Blog from Presiding Officer Dame Rosemary Butler AM
• Video Blog from Rhodri Glyn Thomas AM and in Welsh
• Microsoft Citizenship Blog
• Language Portal Blog

The post Celebrating International Mother Language Day with the Launch of Welsh & New Features appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

Now users can leverage the power of speech-to-speech translations from any Windows device. Simply speak into your device by using the microphone feature to place orders or ask for directions, and hear the translated words in a native speaker’s accent.

In addition to speech input, this new release of the Translator app now offers users the option to use the camera feature in both portrait and landscape mode. Simply point your camera, scan and translate printed language using your tablet or PC to create subtitles for everyday life. 

 
Today, we are also releasing new updates to the Bing Translator app for Windows Phone 8 which include improvements to the speech functionality for better quality and responsiveness of translations, in addition a redesigned user interface for the existing and recently released offline language packs. By downloading offline language packs, you can maintain translation on the go when not connected to the internet and avoid expensive data roaming charges.

You can now download the free app for Windows from the Windows store here and for the Windows Phone from the Windows Phone store here.  Existing users who have already downloaded the app, will be able to access the new updates without needing to download it again. Whether on your Windows Phone or any Windows device, the Translator app is the perfect travel companion to help overcome language barriers, even when there’s no internet connection. To learn more about Bing Translator apps, check out the Translator for Windows and the Translator for Windows Phone product pages.

These apps will become your window to the world, no matter where you are.

The post Say ‘Hello World!’ Announcing Speech Input for the Bing Translator app for Windows appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.