Language Translator
Dallas Whitmoyer
Identify up to 81 languages for free using our Language Identification API endpoint, which includes all translation languages above with Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Belarusian, Burmese, Central Khmer, Chuvash, Esperanto, Georgian, Haitian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Kurdish, Lao, Mongolian, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Persian, Pushto, Somali, Tagalog
Translation Hub is designed for organizations that translate a large volume of documents into many different languages. It is a fully-managed, self-service document translation service that uses both Cloud Translation API and AutoML Translation.
For a simple translated transcript of a video or audio, Speech-to-text API transcribes your video or audio with high accuracy into a text file that can be translated by the Translation API into different languages.
Combining Contact Center AI (CCAI) and Translation API allows you to assist a customer interaction happening in two different languages seamlessly across phone and chat, all in real-time. CCAI helps break language barriers by natively supporting both customer sentiment and call driver analysis, across many different languages. These analyses can be fed back to agents, in their preferred language, for better call outcomes and customer experience.
After you've translated the message, you can select Show original to see the message in the original language or Turn on automatic translation to always translate messages to your preferred language.
In Word for Microsoft 365 when you open a document in a language other than a language you have installed in Word, Word will intelligently offer to translate the document for you. Click the Translate button and a new, machine-translated, copy of the document will be created for you.
If you later want to change the To language for document translation, or if you need to translate a document to more than one language, you can do so, by selecting Set Document Translation Language...from the Translate menu.
You can use the Research pane to translate a phrase, sentence, or paragraph into several selected language pairs in the following Microsoft Office programs: Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio, and Word.
To change the languages that are used for translation, in the Research pane, under Translation, select the languages that you want to translate from and to. For example, to translate English to French, click English in the From list and French in the To list.
To translate text directly in a browser, you can use Bing Translator. Powered by Microsoft Translator, the site provides free translation to and from more than 70 languages. To learn more, see Translating text using Translator.
Word for the web makes it easy to translate an entire document. When you open a document that is in a language other than your default language, Word for the web will automatically offer to create a machine-translated copy for you.
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.[1] The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between translating (a written text) and interpreting (oral or signed communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.
A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words, grammar, or syntax into the target-language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages. Translators, including early translators of sacred texts, have helped shape the very languages into which they have translated.[2]
Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator.[3] More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated "language localisation".[4]
The West and East Slavic languages (except for Russian) adopted the translātiō pattern, whereas Russian and the South Slavic languages adopted the trāductiō pattern. The Romance languages, deriving directly from Latin, did not need to calque their equivalent words for "translation"; instead, they simply adapted the second of the two alternative Latin words, trāductiō.[7]
When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.[7]
When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed those terms, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages.[10] A greater problem, however, is translating terms relating to cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the target language.[15] For full comprehension, such situations require the provision of a gloss.
Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages, or between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating among them. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French actuel ("present", "current"), the Polish aktualny ("present", "current," "topical", "timely", "feasible"),[16] the Swedish aktuell ("topical", "presently of importance"), the Russian актуальный ("urgent", "topical") or the Dutch actueel ("current").
The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon.[16]
In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether.[17]
Compounding the demands on the translator is the fact that no dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translating. The Scottish historian Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had earlier, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Kopczyński.[19]
The translator's special role in society is described in a posthumous 1803 essay by "Poland's La Fontaine", the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek, Ignacy Krasicki:
Though earlier approaches to translation are less commonly used today, they retain importance when dealing with their products, as when historians view ancient or medieval records to piece together events which took place in non-Western or pre-Western environments. Also, though heavily influenced by Western traditions and practiced by translators taught in Western-style educational systems, Chinese and related translation traditions retain some theories and philosophies unique to the Chinese tradition.
Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages, and it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department.[26]
In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translation per se has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial borrowings of Chinese vocabulary and writing system. Notable is the Japanese kanbun, a system for glossing Chinese texts for Japanese speakers.
Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translated Sanskrit material into the local languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary language of culture and government.
Some of the art of classical Chinese poetry [writes Link] must simply be set aside as untranslatable. The internal structure of Chinese characters has a beauty of its own, and the calligraphy in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension. Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five characters per line in a poem like [the one that Eliot Weinberger discusses in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways)], another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung on a wall, presents a rectangle. Translators into languages whose word lengths vary can reproduce such an effect only at the risk of fatal awkwardness....Another imponderable is how to imitate the 1-2, 1-2-3 rhythm in which five-syllable lines in classical Chinese poems normally are read. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less translatable are the patterns of tone arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable (character) belongs to one of two categories determined by the pitch contour in which it is read; in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibit parallelism and mirroring.[29]
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