Tag: Microsoft Translator

Microsoft Translator adds Irish as a new language.

Our ongoing mission to break down language barriers continues with Irish: Today, we have added Irish Gaelic to Microsoft Translator. Irish Gaelic, usually referred to as the Irish Language or just Irish, and commonly known in Irish itself as Gaeilge (pronounced “gwael-guh”), is the latest addition to the Microsoft Translator family of languages. This brings Irish to all scenarios powered by Microsoft Translator, including Custom Translator, which helps customers to build translation systems for domain-specific terminology and style.

Neural machine translation technology has recently achieved impressive quality gains, characterized by highly fluent and accurate output, even for low-resourced languages such as Gaeilge. Using deep learning, we have iteratively refined our machine translation models. With today’s release, our commitment to deliver high-quality machine translation for Gaeilge moves to the next stage, as we prepare to continuously improve translation quality based on feedback from our users.

The Irish Language 

Irish is an official language of the country of Ireland, and also has official status in the European Union. It is classified as a Celtic language, a family of languages that includes Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Manx, and Cornish, first appearing over 2,500 years ago. Irish is spoken as a first language in a number of regions of Ireland and taught in all schools across the country.

Professor Andy Way, head of the MT-team at the ADAPT Research Centre Ireland, shared his support by stating” We are very pleased to hear of the launch of Microsoft’s new neural MT system for Irish.” His colleague, Dr. Teresa Lynn, Research Fellow specializing in Irish language technology at ADAPT, added “Microsoft’s launch of their Irish-language NMT system is wholly complementary to the work we have been doing in the ADAPT over the past few years towards improving Irish machine translation in public administration. With this new release, the wider Irish language community now have the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of advanced language technology.” Likewise, Cllr. Peter Kavanagh, Green Party Irish Language Spokesperson and Co-founder of Pop Up Gaeltacht, said “It’s very positive to see Microsoft launching an Irish language machine translation engine.”

Irish Gaelige is available now, or in the next few days, on all Microsoft Translator apps, add-ins, Office, Translator for Bing, and through the Azure Cognitive Services Translator API for businesses and developers.

What you can do with Microsoft Translator

Translate real-time conversations, menus and street signs, websites, documents, and more using the Translator app for Windows, iOS, Android and the web. Use the Microsoft Translator Text and Speech API, both members of the Azure Cognitive Services family, to help globalize your business and customer interactions. Create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-language understanding.

For more information on Microsoft Translator please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/translator/.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir!

There are close to 7,000 languages spoken around the world today. Yet, sadly, every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, and it is predicted that between 50% and 90% of endangered languages will disappear by next century. When a community loses a language, it loses its connection to the past – and part of its present. It loses a piece of its identity. As we think about protecting this heritage and the importance of preserving language, we believe that new technology can help.

More than many nations, the people of New Zealand are acutely aware of this phenomenon. Centuries ago, the Māori people arrived on the islands to settle in and create a new civilization. Through the centuries and in the isolation of the South Pacific, the Māori developed their own unique culture and language. Today, in New Zealand, 15% of the population is Māori yet only a quarter of the Māori people speak their native language, and only 3% of all people living in New Zealand speak te reo Maori. Statistically, fluency in the language is extremely low.

New Zealand and its institutions have taken notice and are actively taking steps to promote the use of te reo Māori in meaningful ways. More and more schools are teaching te reo Māori, and city councils are revitalizing the country’s indigenous culture by giving new, non-colonial names to sites around their cities. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has promoted the learning of te reo Māori, calling for 1 million new speakers by 2040.  In a simple, yet profound, statement Ardern said, “Māori language is a part of who we are.” Despite all these efforts, today the fluency in te reo Māori is low.

For the past 14 years, Microsoft has been collaborating with te reo Māori experts and Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori (the Māori Language Commission) to weave te reo Māori into the technology that thousands of Kiwis use every day with the goal of ensuring it remains a living language with a strong future. Our collaboration has already resulted in translations of Minecraft educational resources and we recently commissioned a game immersed entirely in the traditional Māori world, Ngā Motu (The Islands).

To focus only on shaping the future ignores the value of the past, as well as our responsibility to preserve and celebrate te reo Māori heritage. This is why we are proud to announce the inclusion of te reo Māori as a language officially recognized in our free Microsoft Translator app. Microsoft Translator supports more than 60 languages, and this means that the free application can translate te reo Māori text into English text and vice versa. It will also support Māori into and from all other languages supported by Microsoft Translator. This is really all about breaking the language barrier at home, at work, anywhere you need it.

Dr. Te Taka Keegan, senior lecturer of computer science at the University of Waikato and one of the many local experts who have helped guide the project from its inception, says: “The language we speak is the heart of our culture. The development of this Māori language tool would not have been possible without many people working towards a common goal over many years. We hope our work doesn’t simply help revitalize and normalize te reo Māori for future generations of New Zealanders, but enables it to be shared, learned and valued around the world. It’s very important for me that the technology we use reflects and reinforces our cultural heritage, and language is the heart of that.”

Te reo Māori will employ Microsoft’s Neural Machine Translation (NMT) techniques, which can be more accurate than statistical translation models. We recently achieved human parity in translating news from Chinese to English, and the advanced machine learning used for te reo Māori will continue to become better and better as even more documents are used to “teach” it every nuance of the language. This technology will be leveraged across all our M365 products and services.

But while the technology is exciting, it’s not the heart of this story. This is about collaborating to develop the tools that boost our collective well-being. New Zealand’s government is also spearheading a “well-being” framework for measuring a nation’s progress in ways that don’t solely reflect economic growth. We need to look at cultural heritage the same way. Preserving our cultural heritage isn’t just a “nice thing to do” – according to the U.N., it’s vital to our resilience, social cohesion and sense of belonging, celebrating the values and stories we have in common.

I was fortunate to visit New Zealand this year, and it is a country that is genuinely working to achieve a delicate cultural balance, one that keeps in mind growth as well as guardianship, which maintains innovation and a future focus whilst preserving a deep reverence for its past. This kind of balance is something all nations should be striving for.

Globally, as part of our AI for Cultural Heritage program, Microsoft has committed $10 million over five years to support projects dedicated to the preservation and enrichment of cultural heritage that leverage the power of artificial intelligence. The ultimate role of technology is to serve humankind, not to replace it. We can harness the latest tools in ways that support an environment rich in diversity, perspectives and learnings from the past. And when we enable that knowledge and experience to be shared with the rest of the world, every society benefits.

For more information on Microsoft Translator please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/translator

Tags: AI, AI for Cultural Heritage, AI for Good, language, M365, Maori, microsoft translator, neural machine translation, New Zealand

Microsoft Translator is happy to announce that it is now certified for ISO, HIPAA, and SOC compliance. This comes as a result of Azure’s commitment to privacy and security.

Last year, Translator announced that it was GDPR compliant as a data processor. Now, Microsoft Translator is ISO, HIPAA, and SOC compliant, in addition to receiving CSA and FedRAMP public cloud attestation.

ISO: Microsoft Translator is ISO certified with five certifications applicable to the service. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an independent nongovernmental organization and the world’s largest developer of voluntary international standards. Translator’s ISO certifications demonstrate its commitment to providing a consistent and secure service. Microsoft Translator’s ISO certifications are:

• ISO 27001 Information Security Management Standards
• ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Systems Standards
• 27018:2014 Code of Practice for Protecting Personal Data in the Cloud
• 20000-1:2011: Information Technology Service Management
• ISO 27017:2015: Code of Practice for Information Security Controls

HIPAA: The Microsoft Translator service complies with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Health Information Technology for Economic and the Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which govern how cloud services can handle personal health information. This ensures that the health services can provide translations to clients knowing that personal data is kept private. Microsoft Translator is included in Microsoft’s HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Health care organizations can enter into the BAA with Microsoft to detail each party’s role in regard to security and privacy provisions under HIPAA and HITECH.

Learn more about HIPAA compliance

 

SOC: The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) developed the Service Organization Controls (SOC) framework, a standard for controls that safeguard the confidentiality and privacy of information stored and processed in the cloud, primarily in regard to financial statements. Microsoft Translator is now SOC type 1, 2, and 3 compliant.

Learn more about SOC Compliance

 

CSA STAR: The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) defines best practices to help ensure a more secure cloud computing environment, and to helping potential cloud customers make informed decisions when transitioning their IT operations to the cloud. The CSA published a suite of tools to assess cloud IT operations: the CSA Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) Stack. It was designed to help cloud customers assess how cloud service providers follow industry best practices and standards, and comply with regulations. Microsoft Translator has received CSA STAR Attestation.

Learn more about CSA STAR

 

FedRAMP: The US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) attests that Microsoft Translator adheres to the security requirements needed for use by US government agencies in the public Azure cloud. The US Office of Management and Budget requires all executive federal agencies to use FedRAMP to validate the security of cloud services. FedRAMP attestation for Microsoft Translator in the dedicated Azure Government cloud is forthcoming.

Learn more about FedRAMP

The Microsoft Translator service is subject to annual audits on all of its certifications to ensure the service continues to be compliant. View more information about Microsoft’s commitment to compliance in the Microsoft Trust Center

Microsoft Translator, a technology that uses artificial intelligence to provide translations for more than 60 languages, has been integrated with SwiftKey for Android, an intelligent keyboard for mobile devices, Microsoft announced on Thursday.

“We wanted to make it really easy for users to be able to translate as they type and to be able to translate incoming messages,” said Colleen Hall, a senior product manager for SwiftKey in London. Microsoft acquired SwiftKey in 2016.

The real-time translation feature is especially handy in the context of messaging with family, friends and colleagues who speak different languages, she noted. Once users tap the Microsoft Translator icon on the SwiftKey keyboard, the app translates as they type and translates incoming messages that users copy.

“They do not have to leave the keyboard in order to do the translations,” Hall explained.

The app also remembers users’ preferences, eliminating the need to scroll through the full list of the more than 60 available languages to select which languages to translate to and from each time the feature is engaged.

The translation capability is available offline to SwiftKey users who have also downloaded the Microsoft Translator app, enabling translations of emails composed, for example, during an overseas flight on a business trip.

Microsoft Translator is a part of Azure Cognitive Services, a collection of AI algorithms. The translation feature is currently available for users of SwiftKey on Android devices, a user base that data indicates is global and highly multilingual, Microsoft said.

“We have always had a strong multilingual offering,” noted Hall, “and now we are bringing Translator to that as well.”

Related:

Microsoft Translator has released Levantine, an Arabic dialect spoken in countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, as its latest AI-powered speech translation language. It will help businesses, educators, travelers, and non-profits communicate across the language barrier with Levantine speakers during meetings, presentations, and Skype calls.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.