We are excited to announce the release of a new UI feature to translate documents in language studio without writing a single line of code. Enterprises can deploy this solution across their organization, enabling employees to translate documents on demand. The feature is powered by Azure Cognitive Services (ACS) Translator document translation API, which can translate documents in variety of formats preserving the original structure and format as in the source document.

Document translation experience in the language studio enables customers to easily evaluate and adopt the service by simply configuring their Azure Translator and Storage resources. Customers could scale and control the usage through Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication.

This new experience leverages the full capabilities of the document translation service and offers more. You could translate documents from either your local system or Azure blob storage. Likewise, the translated documents could be either downloaded to your local system or stored in Azure blob storage. Optionally, you could specify the glossary or custom models to be used during translation.

Why should I use the language studio to translate documents?

• • Enterprise ready UI solution to translate documents securely.
  • Language studio does not store customer data.
  • Scale and control the usage through AAD authentication.
  • You can use your existing Azure account and translator resources.
  • Since it is a web app, you can access the feature from any operating system.

How do I use this feature?

1. 1. Sign In into the language studio using your Azure credentials.
   2. Click on ‘Document translation (Preview)’ tile.
   3. Configure your setup by choosing your Translator resource and Azure Storage account.
   4. Select source and target language(s).
   5. Choose the source document(s) from your local system or blob storage.
   6. Choose the destination for translated files as either blob storage upload or local system download.
   7. Translate!

You can monitor the status of current and previously submitted jobs through the ‘Job History’ page.

References:

• • Translator Documentation
  • Translator Pricing
  • Send your feedback to mtfb@microsoft.com

The post Document Translation now available in the Language Studio appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

We’re excited to announce that, as of today, masculine and feminine alternative translations are available for when translating from English to Spanish, French, or Italian. You can try out this new feature in both Bing Search and Bing Translator verticals.

Over the last few years, the field of Machine Translation (MT) has been revolutionized by the advent of transformer models, leading to tremendous improvements in quality. However, models optimized to capture the statistical properties of data collected from the real world inadvertently learn or even amplify social biases found in that data.

Our latest release is a step towards reducing one of these biases, specifically gender bias that is prevalent in MT systems. Bing Translator has always produced a single translation for an input sentence even when the translations could have had other gender variations including feminine and masculine variants. In accordance with the Microsoft responsible AI principles, we want to ensure we provide correct alternative translations and are more inclusive to all genders. As part of this journey our first step is to provide feminine and masculine translation variants.

Gender is expressed differently across different languages. For example, in English, the word lawyer could refer to either a male or female individual, but in Spanish, abogada would refer to a female lawyer, while abogado would refer to a male one. In the absence of information about the gender of a noun like ‘lawyer’ in a source sentence, MT models may resort to selecting an arbitrary gender for the noun in the target language. Often, these arbitrary gender assignments align with stereotypes, perpetuating harmful societal bias (Stanovsky et al., 2019; Ciora et al., 2021) and leading to translations that are not fully accurate.

In the example below, you notice that while translating gender-neutral sentences from English to Spanish, the translated text follows the stereotypical gender role, i.e., lawyer is translated as being male.

As there is no context in the source sentence that implies the gender of the lawyer, producing a translation with the assumption of either a male or female lawyer would both be valid. Now, Bing Translator produces translations with both feminine and masculine forms.

System design

We aimed to design our system to meet the following key criteria for providing gendered alternatives:

1. The feminine and masculine variants should have minimal differences except for those needed to convey gender.
2. We wanted to cover a wide range of sentences where multiple gendered alternatives are possible.
3. We wanted to ensure that the translations preserve the meaning of the original source sentence.

Detecting gender ambiguity

In order to accurately detect gender ambiguity in source text, we utilize a coreference model to analyze inputs containing animate nouns. For instance, if a given input text contains a gender-neutral profession word, we only want provide gendered alternatives for it when its gender can’t be determined by other information in the sentence. For example: On translating an English sentence “The lawyer met her driver at the hotel lobby.” into French we can determine that the lawyer is female, while the gender of the driver is unknown.

Generating alternate translation

When the source sentence is ambiguously gendered, we examine our translation system’s output to decide if an alternative gender interpretation is possible. If so, we proceed to determine the best way to revise the translation. We begin by constructing a set of candidate target translations by rewriting the original translation. We apply linguistic constraints based on dependency relations to ensure consistency in the proposed alternatives and prune the erroneous candidates.

However, in many cases, even after applying our constraints, we are left with multiple candidate rewrites for the gendered alternative translation. To determine the best option, we evaluate each candidate by scoring it with our translation model. By leveraging the fact that a good gender rewrite will also be an accurate translation of the source sentence, we are able to ensure high accuracy in our final output.

Leveraging managed online endpoints in Azure Machine Learning

The gendered alternative feature in Bing is hosted on managed online endpoints in Azure Machine Learning. Managed online endpoints provide a unified interface to invoke and manage model deployments on Microsoft-managed compute in a turnkey manner. They enable us to take advantage of scalable and reliable endpoints without being concerned about infrastructure management. This inference environment also enables the processing of large numbers of requests with low latency. Our ability to create and deploy the gender debias service with the latest frameworks and technologies has been greatly improved through the use of managed inference features in Azure Machine Learning. By leveraging these features, we have been able to maintain low COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) and ensure straightforward security and privacy compliance.

How can you contribute?

To facilitate progress in gender bias reduction in MT, we are releasing a test corpus containing gender-ambiguous translation examples from English into Spanish, French and Italian. Each English source sentence is accompanied by multiple translations, covering each possible gender variation.

Our test set is constructed to be challenging, morphologically rich and linguistically diverse. This corpus has been instrumental in our development process. It was developed with the help of a bilingual linguists with significant translation experience. We are also releasing a technical paper that discusses the test corpus in detail and the methodology and tools for evaluation.

GATE: A challenge set for Gender-Ambiguous Translation Examples – Paper

GATE: A challenge set for Gender-Ambiguous Translation Examples – Test set

Path forward

Through this work we aim to improve the quality of MT output in cases of ambiguous source gender, as well as facilitate the development of better and more inclusive natural language processing (NLP) tools in general. Our initial release focuses on translating from English to Spanish, French, and Italian. Going forward, we plan to expand to new language pairs, as well as cover additional scenarios and types of biases.

Credits:

Ranjita Naik, Spencer Rarrick, Sundar Poudel, Varun Mathur, Jeshwanth Kumar Chandrala, Charan Mohan, Lee Schwartz, Steven Nguyen, Amit Bhagwat, Vishal Chowdhary.

The post Bing’s gendered translations tackle bias in translation appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

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.

Read all about how the Microsoft Translator live feature breaks language barriers and provides translation capabilities for diverse populations. Microsoft for Education blog

The post Onslow County Schools in North Carolina uses Microsoft Translator for student success and parent-teacher communication 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.

With this new text translation language available, locals and travelers can communicate from and to Bangla throughout Bangladesh, the Indian subcontinent and around the globe by using the Microsoft Translator apps on their preferred device (Windows, Android, Kindle, or iOS).  Businesses can also easily integrate the Translator text API in their business processes such as customer support, web localization, training or internal communication.  The API can also add native translation support for solutions businesses market for industries such as manufacturing, retail, education, gaming, or government services.

With the Microsoft Translator live feature, whether in the Translator apps or on the web at http://translate.it, users can also translate speech from any of the nine supported languages to Bangla. This is particularly useful in the context of presentations where Bangla-speaking audiences are not familiar with the language spoken by the presenter. The audience can then ask questions to the presenter, in Bangla, by typing the questions directly on their device.

In addition to these apps and the developer-friendly Microsoft Translator API (part of the Cognitive Services family of AI-powered APIs on Azure), Translator also powers the translation capabilities of a wide range of Microsoft products, providing timely and cost effective translation when you need it, where you need it. Translator is integrated into Outlook  Microsoft Translator on Bing, Cortana, Edge, SharePoint, and Yammer.

If you need to translate documents in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or even pdf files, and keep their original formatting while doing it, you can use Document Translator, a free open-source app available on GitHub.

Bangla is also available as an instant messaging language in Skype (both the Skype Windows desktop app and Skype for Windows) so that you can communicate from across the city to around the globe and be found in translation.

Learn More:

• Get Started with the Microsoft Translator API
• Microsoft Translator Apps
• How machine translation works

The post Microsoft announces Bangla, the latest 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.

One of the most important innovations from Microsoft Translator was showcased earlier this year. During a  talk at the Code Conference, by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, unveiled an early look at the Skype Translator app. This app represents a breakthrough in language translation jointly developed by Microsoft researchers and Skype engineers, bridging geographic and language barriers through the use of real-time speech-to-speech translation.The functionality combines Skype voice and instant messaging, Microsoft Translator and machine-learning based technologies for speech recognition used in Windows and Windows Phone Translation applications.

In addition to the Skype Translator app, below is a summary of additional highlights from Microsoft Translator over the last year:

• Song Translator App – Last fall, our Translator Summer Interns: Michelle Agcamaran, Priya Ganesan, and Kat Zhou built an app to showcase the capabilities of Translator and our partners in a new and interesting way. After three months of work they launched: Song Translator. The song translation app allows users to upload their favorite songs with lyrics, add timestamps to the lyrics, then translate and record the song in another language.
• Release of Welsh – In February, Microsoft Translator is announced Welsh as a new supported language in partnership with the National Assembly for Wales and leveraging the Microsoft Translator Hub. The Welsh became the latest to join a growing list of languages to benefit from translation services provided by Microsoft Translator.
• Blog Plug In – Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. released a new Bing Translator plugin that lets you apply the power of Bing Translator to any WordPress site running version 3.8 or later to translate your site into any of the 45+ supported languages. Adding WordPress to the list of blogging sites including Tumblr.
• App Localization – This year Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT) team announced the release of MAT 3.1. The Multilingual App Toolkit integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio to provide Windows Store apps and Windows Phone apps with translation support powered, translation file management, and editor tools powered by Microsoft Translator.
• Yammer Language Support – Earlier this year, Yammer announced key localization updates across its web client, mobile apps, and the Yammer Success Center, and introduced message translation in both the iOS and Android Yammer apps, powered by Microsoft Translator®. 
• Updates to Windows and Windows Phone Translator Apps –  Over the past year updates were released for Windows and Windows Phone Translator apps which include: speech-to-speech for Windows app, new offline language packs, new language support for camera, keyboard modes, user interface design improvements, amongst many other updates and improvements.

Real-time communication and collaboration technologies from video conferencing to social media have removed the physical barriers of communication and today translation technology is paving the way for removing the barrier of language in the same way. The Microsoft Translator team is committed to helping to enable business, communities, and consumers to be able to communicate and collaborate regardless of language through technology innovation.

This is just a small sampling of the many things that Microsoft Translator has been working on over the past year, to learn more about what Microsoft Translator has been up to, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Happy translating!
 

The post Microsoft Translator Celebrates International Translation Day appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.

MAT is a free technology powered by Microsoft Translator’s automatic translation engine which makes localization painless– whether you are adding the language features to a Windows, Windows Phone, or traditional desktop app. Check out the full video below to discover all of the cool features of the MAT, and immediately take advantage of greater reach in today’s global marketplace.

For more information on the Multilingual App Toolkit, you can also click here.

The post Quicker and Cheaper Localization with the Multilingual App Toolkit appeared first on Microsoft Translator Blog.