Microsoft highlights quality updates in latest Translator update
Microsoft Translator has never been my go-to application when it comes to machine translation. I always felt that Google Translator did a better job in turning foreign text into something that resembled something that I could understand.
Google Translate is far from perfect, however, and DeepL replaced it for the languages that it supports when it was introduced.
Microsoft released a Microsoft Translator update yesterday that improves overall quality by up to 11% for Chinese and German translations from and to English according to the company.
Based on human evaluations using industry standard test sets, we are seeing up to 11% improvement in overall quality.
The next-generation Neural Machine Translation technology of Microsoft Translator promises better translations. The changes are available on all platforms including on Bing Translate, the Translator application, and the Translator API.
Microsoft developed a research system that, the company says, managed to achieve "human parity translation on a commonly used set of news stories"; this new system, which uses next generation neural net architectures and dual learning, has been introduced with the update to the translation API.
Microsoft promises to roll out the improvements to additional languages, without mentioning any, in early 2019.
Closing Words
While I cannot judge if the quality of Chinese to English or English to Chinese translations have improved, I decided to try and see how well Bing Translator would translate English to German.
I copied some sample texts, from this blog and from Wikipedia, to determine how good it is and how it fares against when compared to Google Translate and DeepL translations.
My impression based on this very unscientific approach is that Microsoft managed to move very close to Google Translator in regards to translation quality. DeepL still seems to have an edge when it comes to translations as it produced better results.
All machine translation samples were understandable on the other hand and it is possible that Microsoft's or Google's translation service may have the edge sometimes.
I will stick with DeepL for now provided that I need to translate one of the supported languages. My main gripe with DeepL is that it supports only a few languages (seven in total).
Now You: Which translation service do you prefer, and why?
Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.