Issue with Azure Cognitive Services Translation Adding Unspecified Month

Question

When using Azure Cognitive Services to translate the following text from English to Dutch, the translation incorrectly adds a month that does not exist in the source text:

Good Evening,
For this coming week I can be available
Wednesday 5th anytime from 15h00
Thursday 6th anytime from 14h15
Friday 7th anytime from 14h15
Let me know what fits best with your schedule,
Thank you
Regards x

The translated text is as follows:

Goedenavond
Voor de komende week kan ik beschikbaar zijn
Woensdag 5 september vanaf 15u00
Donderdag 6 op elk moment vanaf 14u15
Vrijdag 7 september vanaf 14u15
Laat me weten wat het beste bij jouw schema past,
Bedankt
Groeten x

What could be the reason for the translation service 'inventing' the month (september in this case) when it is not specified in the source text?

Answer 1

Hi @Jonathan Apeldoorn - Ziber,

Adding to above response, this issue likely occurs because Azure Cognitive Services Translation is applying contextual interpretation based on common date formats. When numbers like "5th" and "7th" appear without a month, the model may infer a likely month based on regional or linguistic patterns.

To avoid this, try explicitly specifying the month as "Wednesday 5" instead of "Wednesday 5th" or adding "of this month" to guide the translation. You can also experiment with different formatting, such as "5/6/7" without ordinal indicators. Let us know if you'd like further adjustments.

I hope this helps. Thank you.

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Answer 2

The issue of Azure Cognitive Services translation adding an unspecified month, such as "September" in your example, can be attributed to the limitations of machine translation systems. These systems often process text sentence by sentence without full contextual awareness of the document. As a result, they may make assumptions based on patterns learned from their training data, which can lead to inaccuracies, such as inserting a month that wasn't mentioned in the source text.

In this case, the translation system likely inferred a month based on the context of the week mentioned, leading to the incorrect addition of "September." This is a common challenge with machine translation, especially when dealing with date and time formats that may not be explicitly stated in the source material.

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References:

• Azure AI Translator Transparency Note
• Alexa Translations A.I (general)