Microsoft Azure’s New Document Translation Service

News of this feature broke on the Microsoft Tech Community website. Document translation is a vital tool for companies that work with overseas entities. However, COVID-19 has caused translation businesses to slow down or stop altogether.

To help businesses stay afloat during this tough time, Microsoft is releasing an automatic translator that can convert a document to your language of choice. This tool should help businesses speed up the translation process and get more work done in a shorter timespan.

Microsoft already has some great tools for converting documents from one language to another, such as in-software Microsoft Word translation. However, Azure’s document translation will spread the net across all kinds of documents, like PowerPoint and PDF files.

The software giant is quick to remind you that document translation is a lot more complicated than just running everything through a translator. When you’re translating a document, you have to take care that all of the visual elements are represented as accurately as possible to the original.

If you just run it through a translator and call it a day, some sentences will be longer or shorter than the original design, which messes with the visual formatting. Text may run off the page, burst out of text boxes, or add a line break at a weird point in a sentence.

Microsoft aims to solve this issue by having its automatic translator respect and abide by the original formatting. Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager Christ Wendt explains it as such:

The company currently offers document translation for $15 per million characters on the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service pricing website. As such, if you have some documents that require translating, now is a good time to try out Azure’s translator.

Automatic Translation for a COVID-19 World

With translator services slowing down due to COVID-19, AI-driven translation has never been more important. Microsoft aims to spearhead its push into machine translation by supporting full documents. We’ll have to see if the automatic translations and formatting are as good as the company claims.

Fortunately, Microsoft does have a  solid track record for automatic translation. We recently named the Bing Translator one of the best online translators you can use.

Image Credit: Elena Abrazhevich / Shutterstock.com