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.

Service access to Microsoft Translator in DataMarket ends on April 30, 2017. To avoid service disruption, Microsoft Translator, part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services collection of APIs, is now available in the Azure portal.

Below is a summary of the changes to your subscription:

We recommend that you take these steps to migrate:

Your Azure account uses a different identity than your Azure DataMarket account. The corrections you have collected using the AddTranslation function will not be available until you migrate them, which needs to be completed before April 30, 2017. To access the simple tool to make your corrections available under your old and new identities, please visit the CTF: Migrate your collaborative translations before April 30, 2017, from Azure DataMarket to Azure webpage.

For support and additional updates, please visit the Microsoft Translator User Forum.

The post Reminder: Move Translator API subscriptions from DataMarket to Azure before April 30, 2017 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.

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.

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.