{"id":9400,"date":"2021-12-16T09:33:24","date_gmt":"2021-12-16T17:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https://www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/translator/blog\/?p=9400"},"modified":"2021-12-17T15:37:36","modified_gmt":"2021-12-17T23:37:36","slug":"microsoft-translators-highlights-of-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https://www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/translator/blog\/2021\/12\/16\/microsoft-translators-highlights-of-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Translator\u2019s highlights of 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Throughout 2021 Translator brought new innovations to help people communicate regardless of the language they speak. Here are some of the highlights.<\/p>\n
Document translation is a new feature of the Translator service that translates entire documents, or batches of documents, in a variety of file formats preserving their original structure and format.<\/p>\n
Document translation was specifically designed to translate large files with rich content. You can also apply custom glossaries and custom translation models built with Custom Translator to make sure that your documents translate exactly the way you want.<\/p>\n
Learn More:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Translator service on Azure is now available in containers in gated preview. Containers enable you to run some features of the Translator service in your own environment. They are ideal for organizations with limited Internet connectivity, or for organizations with specific security and data governance requirements that prevent them from sending information to the cloud.<\/p>\n Some of the benefits of containers for certain organizations include:<\/p>\n Learn more:<\/strong> In 2021, Translator added 23 new languages and dialects for a grand total of more than 100! Adding these languages was made possible by the advent of transformer architecture which paved new ways for creating machine translation models, enabling training with smaller amounts of material than before. Using multilingual transformer architecture, we can now augment training data with material from other languages, often in the same or a related language family, to produce models for languages with small amounts of data \u2014commonly referred to as low-resource languages.<\/p>\n Learn more:<\/strong><\/p>\n This year at the annual Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2021, the Microsoft Translator ZCode team, working together with the Microsoft Project Turing<\/a> team and Microsoft Research Asia, competed in the \u201cLarge-scale Multilingual Translation\u201d track and won. The track consisted of a Full Task of translating between all 10,000 directions across 101 languages, and two Small tasks: One focused on 5 central and southern European languages, and one on 5 south-east Asian languages. The Microsoft ZCode-DeltaLM model won all three tasks by huge margins, including an incredible 10+ point gain over the M2M100 model in the large task evaluated on a massive 10,000 language pairs.<\/p>\n Learn more<\/strong> Group Transcribe, a new app from the Microsoft Garage, was introduced in March. Group Transcribe provides real-time transcription and translation for in-person meetings and conversations. Powered by cutting edge AI speech and language technology, Group Transcribe allows each participant to use their own device, providing highly accurate speaker attribution so conversation participants can see who said what in their preferred language.<\/p>\n Group Transcribe provides high-quality, real-time transcription and translation:<\/p>\n Group Transcribe is available now on iOS<\/a>.<\/p>\n Learn more:<\/strong> In June we updated the Translator multi-device conversations feature on the web (translate.it<\/a>). With the new version of conversations on the web, you can now create a preset conversation code that can be reused for your subsequent conversations. You can then invite anyone to join the conversation from their own phone, tablet, or laptop.<\/p>\n Preset conversations are designed for educators, presenters, or for reoccurring meetings where you need live transcript or translation to keep everybody in the conversation, regardless of the language they speak.<\/p>\n Learn more:<\/strong> This summer we added regional accents to the Microsoft Translator app on iOS<\/a> and Android<\/a>. Known as Speech Regions, you can now select the accent of text-to-speech audio output you would like to hear while using the app. For instance, if you wanted to hear a translation into English you would be able to select American, British, Australian, or other accents.<\/p>\n Along with this update, we also updated the app\u2019s language picker to make it easier to see which translation features are available for each language.<\/p>\n\n
Containers available in gated preview<\/h2>\n
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\nTranslator Service Now Available in Containers<\/a><\/p>\nTranslator now supports more than 100 languages and dialects!<\/h2>\n
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Award winning research \u2013 Multilingual translation at scale<\/h2>\n
\nMultilingual translation at scale: 10000 language pairs and beyond<\/a><\/p>\nGroup Transcribe, a Microsoft Garage project<\/h2>\n
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\nNew Garage project Group Transcribe helps you transcribe and translate while advancing inclusive speech AI<\/a><\/p>\nPermanent conversation codes in the Translator web app<\/h2>\n
\nAccess your conversations with a permanent conversation code using Microsoft Translator<\/a><\/p>\nNew Speech Regions and Updated Language Picker in the Translator App<\/h2>\n