{"id":9120,"date":"2020-12-16T11:24:20","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T19:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https://www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/translator/blog\/?p=9120"},"modified":"2020-12-16T11:24:20","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T19:24:20","slug":"microsoft-translators-highlights-of-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https://www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/translator/blog\/2020\/12\/16\/microsoft-translators-highlights-of-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Translator\u2019s highlights of 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2020 has been a difficult year around the world, but there has been an occasional bright spot. Here are some of the highlights we saw over the last year.<\/p>\n
In 2020, we added support for 12 new languages, including seven languages from the Indian subcontinent \u2013 Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, and Punjabi; three languages from Central Asia \u2013 Dari, Kazakh, Pashto; one from Southwest Asia \u2013 Kurdish (including two dialects: Central and Northern Kurdish); and one from Europe \u2013 Irish Gaelic. There are now 74 languages<\/a> available in Microsoft Translator for text translation.<\/p>\n This year we also added new dialects for existing translation languages: European Portuguese and Canadian French. Previously, Portuguese and French were offered as single language options. Now, you can specifically select either Brazilian or European Portuguese and either French or Canadian French for better translations to your intended dialect.<\/p>\n The details:<\/p>\n Custom Translator version 2 was a huge technological achievement which significantly improved the quality of custom translations. Custom Translator version 2 was rolled out in two phases to provide two key upgrades: data residency and improved translation quality. In August, phase one of the V2 rollout enabled regional data residency in the Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe, and additional US regions. This allowed customers who previously could not use Custom Translator due to corporate data security, data privacy, and regulatory requirements to keep their training data in the region of their choice. Phase one also improved translation quality for customers using dictionary-only models by switching to Translator\u2019s state-of-the-art transformer architecture.<\/p>\n Phase two, which was released in November, extended transformer architecture to deliver a huge gain in translation quality. Customers can now build custom models with all document types (Training, Testing, Tuning, Phrase Dictionary and Sentence Dictionary) using full text documents, like Office documents, PDFs, HTML and plain text.<\/p>\n Learn more:<\/p>\n\n
Custom Translator version 2<\/h2>\n