Communications of the ACM
Microsoft Meets Star Trek With Universal Translator
Microsoft's Translator Hub
Credit: CNET
A new system from Microsoft can automatically translate documents in one language to any other language.
Translator Hub makes use of a translation engine that resides on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. Microsoft says Translator Hub is easy to use, even for people who are not linguists or machine-translation experts. Users feed paired documents into the engine that have already been translated, and after processing the translation examples, the engine will learn to automatically translate between those languages.
"Automated language translation has been dominated by a few major providers, resulting in coverage that is limited to fewer than 100 languages--even though there are more than 7,000 languages in the world," Microsoft says. "Speakers of these other languages must adopt non-indigenous languages to be able to access the global knowledge base--or they risk being excluded from the vast wealth of information it offers."
Users can fine-tune Translation Hub to translate terms that are commonly used in specific industries, such as health care or finance, and translations can occur across various social media platforms. The system can be used for free in the cloud.
From InformationWeek
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