Microsoft has announced yesterday that Japanese is now the 10th speech translation language supported by Microsoft Translator. As with other speech translation languages, (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish), Japanese is now available across all Microsoft Translator supported technologies and products, including Skype Translator.
In a seperate blog post, the Skype team shared that supporting Japanese for real-time speech translation was a difficult challenge. “Japanese has commonly been noted as one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn, due to its entirely different grammatical structure and vocabulary belonging to the Japonic linguistic family,” explained the team. “Japan has also become a beloved destination for both tourism and business, and we’re excited for the potential benefit Skype Translator will bring to Japan, the community and our users.”
For text translations from English to Japanese and vice-versa, Microsoft Translator also leverages the company’s neural network based platform, which delivers much better results than before. “Whether you translate a webpage in Edge, an email in Outlook, or a simple sentence on bing.com/translator, all of your translations will be performed with our state of the art neural network systems,” explained the company. Microsoft Translator is also available as a cross-platform app, and if you have yet to try it you can get it from the download links below.
