Azure AI Translator
An Azure service to easily conduct machine translation with a simple REST API call.
491 questions
German dictionary entries have incorrect capitalization
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Sebastian Rettig
5
Reputation points
Hi,
I want to use the dictionary components of Azure Translator. I've noticed, however, that all the German dictionary entries seem to ignore capitalization in the displayTarget field. German nouns are always capitalized, but all German nouns returned by the API are lowercase.
Example (when requesting the dictionary for English "cup"):
[
{
"normalizedSource": "cup",
"displaySource": "cup",
"translations": [
{
"normalizedTarget": "tasse",
"displayTarget": "tasse",
"posTag": "NOUN",
"confidence": 0.7572,
"prefixWord": "",
"backTranslations": [
{
"normalizedText": "cup",
"displayText": "cup",
"numExamples": 0,
"frequencyCount": 17840
},
{
"normalizedText": "bowl",
"displayText": "bowl",
"numExamples": 1,
"frequencyCount": 190
}
]
}
]
}
]
The capitalization should be "Tasse" and not "tasse". I don't want to add custom logic regarding the capitalization of a single language, as my app is language agnostic. However, I can't use the translation results like this. Is this something that is broken in the service or is there a workaround?
Azure AI Translator
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romungi-MSFT 48,916 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator2023-03-10T09:06:06.3133333+00:00 Sebastian Rettig I believe you are using the dictionary lookup scenario here. With respect to this API there is no parameter available to apply punctuation or capitalization in this context. Post processing of the response is required for this scenario, I believe this might not be an option in your case as a workaround.
The custom translator dictionaries though address this scenario based on what is requested and document provided for training.
If you're using a phrase dictionary, capitalization and punctuation are important. Dictionary entries are case- and punctuation-sensitive. Custom Translator will only match words and phrases in the input sentence that use exactly the same capitalization and punctuation marks as specified in the source dictionary file. Also, translations will reflect the capitalization and punctuation provided in the target dictionary file.
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Sebastian Rettig 5 Reputation points
2023-03-10T16:15:09.1966667+00:00 Thank you for your answer!
Post-processing is relatively complex (e.g. multiword compounds) I think and very language-specific. I might be able to get this to work for German (my native language), but it would mean that all other languages that also have capitalization rules, would be broken. That's why I'd like to avoid it.
As far as I understand, using phrase dictionaries would mean I have to feed all the content into the dictionaries before using them. As I need a generic translation API, I can't go that way.
Looks like I have to look elsewhere...
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