What is Translator?
Azure AI Translator is a cloud-based service that provides language translation functionality to your applications. The service is a proven, customizable, and scalable technology for machine translation. The exact same translation technology used by Translator, is currently being used globally by billions of users within applications such as Microsoft Office, Bing, and Microsoft Edge.
Translator uses Neural Machine Translation, which increases fluency and readability of the interpreted text by translating individual words using the full context of the sentence. Further, Translator can be personalized through Custom glossaries and Custom Translation to again increase fluency and readability. Customization is useful if your documents contain unique terminologies such as organization-specific vocabulary or pronouns.
Translator services
Text-to-text translation converts strings of text from one language to another, supporting 90 languages and dialects. With Text-to-text translation, you can quickly request translation from one language to another in near-real-time. The speed and accuracy of Translator enables you to easily add multilanguage user experiences to your applications with any operating system.
Document Translation works with PDF, HTML, .tsv, and all Microsoft document types such as PowerPoint, Outlook messages, and Excel documents - with up to 1,000 documents per request. The API batch translates documents while preserving the source text's layout and formatting, saving time and manual effort.
Custom Translation allows you to tailor-make a system for translating text and documents, in 60 languages. Industry and business-specific terminology can be added to build a translation system that performs better with domain-specific terminologies and styles. Customized translation systems can integrate into existing applications, workflows, and websites to improve translations.
More functionality
Automatic language detection can improve reliability and enhance user experience by automatically identifying the source language for translation. This service has a broad range of over 50 languages, from Klingon to Kurdish.
Some words are unique to a language and don't directly translate. Transliteration can interpret a word from the alphabet of one language to another for pronunciation of words and names that don't directly translate. For instance, you could use literal translation from Japanese for "good afternoon" or transliteration for "Konnichiwa."
Dictionaries offer alternative translations for words or figures of speech. You can also make your own dictionary that automatically applies your custom translations.
Profanity filters are available for translations. While the Translator service keeps profanity in translations by default, the profanity filtering option allows you to automatically delete or mark profanity with appropriate tags in your translation.
Note
Safe and sound
The Translator service is built on Azure infrastructure, it offers enterprise-grade security, availability, compliance, and manageability. No data sent for translation through the Translator Text API is kept, and no record of the submitted text is saved in persistent storage in any Microsoft datacenter.