Outlook suddenly stopped translating emails

Question

Hello,

Good morning.

About 3 or 4 days ago, Outlook stopped automatically translating emails.

All of my settings look correct. Auto-translate is on to automatically translate all emails to English and there are no prohibitions set against translating into English. My daily work requires communications with individuals in several languages. Since the auto-translation has stopped functioning, the remaining options are to use either 1. the manual translator tool for Outlook which opens on the side of the window (this opens only a few sentences at a time in very small text and is not useful for long emails), or 2. to copy and paste every email into an external translator site (i.e. Google or Deep L, etc.). However, with hundreds of emails a day to read and respond to, this is extremely inefficient. Other members on my team are also experiencing the same issue, which makes communication between team members much less efficient. Outlook's automatic translation was super convenient for this and it is disappointing that it suddenly stopped functioning.

Is it possible to fix the issue with the automatic translations?

Thank you, kindly.

Answer 1

Dear users, 

I’d like to provide you with an update regarding the issue where auto-translate has stopped working. 

Microsoft is aware of this issue and is actively working on a resolution. I understand how this may impact your workflow, and I sincerely appreciate your patience while this is being investigated. 

As a temporary workaround, you can still translate emails manually by using the “Translate message” option available in Outlook. 

For updates on the status of the fix, you can follow this article here: Auto Translate stopped working in classic Outlook

Please note that this is a user-to-user support forum. Moderators, contributors including external Microsoft employees cannot directly intervene in Microsoft product features or access back-end systems. Our role is limited to providing technical guidance on reported issues, requests, or ideas only.

I will also continue to actively monitor this on my end and will keep you informed as soon as a resolution becomes available. Once again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your understanding while Microsoft works to resolve this issue. 

Kind regards, 

 

Answer 2

What a surprise... M$ breaking their own products. Now that they finally fixed the copy-pasting images on the Outlook web version, they manage to break the translating feature.

And no, this has nothing to do with the "Turn on optional connected experiences". This is on, and has always been on on my work account, and IT has not changed anything.

Stop breaking things, properly test changes, and please include somewhere the current version of the web app. And same goes to all other web apps like Teams. It's impossible to properly report issues without knowing exactly what version we are using.

Answer 3

Hello BM,

Thank you for posting to Microsoft Q&A and for providing the screenshot with such a detailed explanation. I understand how frustrating it is to lose a feature that is so critical to your team's daily workflow and efficiency, especially when dealing with such a high volume of multilingual emails. 

To serve the translation process, Outlook requires a privacy setting called "Connected Experiences" to be active so it can communicate with the translation servers. Because your entire team suddenly lost this feature at the same time, the highest probability is that your organization's IT department pushed a security update, Intune profile, or Group Policy that globally disabled this connection. 

Here are the steps to check this and troubleshoot further: 

1. Check "Connected Experiences" Settings 

• In Outlook, go to Settings > General > Privacy and data. 
• In the Privacy and data section, click Privacy settings and look for the option to Turn on optional connected experiences. 
• If it is unchecked and grayed out: This means you cannot click it because your IT administrator has locked it down at the tenant level. In this case, you will need to escalate the issue directly to your IT team so they can re-enable the policy. 
• If it is not grayed out: Try toggling it off, then turn it back on. Restart Outlook and check if the translation feature works again. 

2. Update the App 

Ensure that your Outlook application is fully up to date with the latest releases, as pending updates can sometimes cause feature dropouts. 

3. Check Outlook Web & Submit Feedback 

If your app is already up to date and the Connected Experiences toggle is turned on, please check Outlook Web. 

• If the automatic translation is not available on the web version either, please submit feedback directly to Microsoft using the in-app help/feedback tool. 
• In the meantime, you and your team will likely still need to use the manual sidebar tool or external web translators until Microsoft has fully investigated and resolved the outage. 

I hope this information helps pinpoint the cause of the issue so your team can get back to communicating efficiently. Please feel free to reply if you need any further assistance or clarification. Thank you for your understanding!

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