{"id":3444,"date":"2016-03-08T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-08T08:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/translation\/2016\/03\/08\/microsoft-helps-translate-your-arabic-conversations-face-to-face-or-across-the-globe\/"},"modified":"2016-03-08T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T08:01:00","slug":"microsoft-helps-translate-your-arabic-conversations-face-to-face-or-across-the-globe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https://www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/translator/blog\/2016\/03\/08\/microsoft-helps-translate-your-arabic-conversations-face-to-face-or-across-the-globe\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft helps translate your Arabic conversations face-to-face or across the globe"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Microsoft helps translate your Arabic conversations face-to-face or across the globe Today, Microsoft Translator adds Modern Standard Arabic to its list of conversation languages<\/a> for speech-to-speech translation. Whether you are using Skype Translator<\/a> to communicate across distances or the Microsoft Translator apps on Android or iOS to communicate face to face, we continue to help break the language barrier by allowing you to translate Arabic conversations into seven languages (Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish).<\/p>\n

Modern Standard Arabic<\/a> (MSA) is used in the Middle East and Northern Africa as a standard form of the Arabic language. Unlike dialects which may vary greatly from country to country, MSA is used throughout the Arab-speaking world in written and formal communication such as media, higher education, and government. Although rarely used informally, most native Arabic speakers are familiar with MSA.<\/p>\n

Arabic is a complex language for which to develop speech recognition and translation technologies. Microsoft has invested in worldwide research centers for many years and in this case, our Natural Language Processing researchers in our Advanced Technology Laboratory in Cairo, Egypt took the lead in developing this new language system. After months of limited progress with speech recognition quality, the researchers were able to find innovative approaches that allowed them to dramatically reduce the Word Error Rate<\/a> (WER, a typical industry measure for speech recognition quality).<\/p>\n

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“Knowing how popular Skype and Microsoft Translator are for Arabic speakers, we were very excited to improve the quality for Arabic conversations and to be a key part of the speech-to-speech translation project,” said Mohamed Afify, principal researcher in our Cairo Lab. “To achieve this we, for instance, gathered data from talk shows or social media to enrich both our speech recognition and translation models”<\/p>\n

Speech translation from and to Modern Standard Arabic is now available worldwide, including:<\/p>\n