Microsoft adds support for 12 new languages and dialects to Translator

Microsoft’s Translator now supports over 100 languages and dialects. The service recently gained support for 12 new dialects and languages: Bashkir, Dhivehi, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian (Cyrillic), Mongolian (Traditional), Tatar, Tibetan, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek (Latin). Those newly supported languages are collectively spoken by 84.6 million people. With support for over 100 languages, Translator can help text and documents be accessed by 5.66 billion people.

Translator supports commonly spoken languages, including English, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and several languages from China. Microsoft has also spent several years improving AI technology to support low-resource and endangered languages, such as Inuktitut, which is a dialect of Inuktut that is spoken by around 40,000 Inuit in Canada.

Microsoft’s blog post announcing the newly supported languages highlights how Translator is used by several organizations.

“Thousands of organizations have turned to Translator to communicate with their members, employees and clients around the world,” explains Microsoft. “The Volkswagen Group, for example, is using the machine translation technology to serve its customers in more than 60 languages. The workload involves translating more than 1 billion words each year.”

Volkswagen has also used features that allow it to fine-tune translation with industry-specific terms.

Microsoft explains how its AI model called Z-code combines several languages from a language family to improve translation. For example, Romanian translations were improved when the AI model was trained with French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian data.

Translator is available in Microsoft’s Translator apps, Office, and Translator for Bing. Azure Cognitive Services Translator and Azure Cognitive Services Speech also work with the newly supported languages.

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