Azure AI Translator

Azure AI Translator, a part of the Azure AI services, is a cloud-based neural machine translation service that enables businesses to translate text and documents across multiple languages in real time and in batches. The service also offers customization options, enabling businesses to fine-tune translations to specific domain or industry contexts. Azure AI Translator supports more than 100 languages and dialects, and it scales automatically to handle both small-scale projects and enterprise-level translation needs.
Azure AI Translator powers many Microsoft products and services used by thousands of businesses and millions of users worldwide for language translation and other language-related operations.

Core Features

• Text Translation
  • Description: Translates text across multiple languages in real time, making it easy to integrate translation into data process automation, facilitate conversation between speakers of different languages, perform live caption translation, and browse webpages in the language of your choice.
  • Key Features
    • Translate: Translates a single text phrase or an array of text phrases to multiple target-language texts. Users can specify whether to use standard or custom machine translation models in the request.
    • Transliterate: Converts a single text phrase or an array of text phrases from native script to Latin script and vice versa.
    • Languages: Returns a list of languages supported by Translate and Transliterate operations. This request does not require authentication.
• Document Translation
  • Description: Translates complex documents across all supported languages and dialects while preserving original document structure and data format. Documents can be translated using standard or custom machine translation models, with the option for users to provide glossaries to ensure that specific terms are translated consistently according to their preferences.
  • Key Features
    • Batch translation: Translates multiple documents and large files asynchronously across up to 10 target languages in a single request. The service retrieves source documents from an Azure blob storage container, processes and translates the textual content, and then places the translated documents into a target Azure blob storage container.
    • Single document translation: Translates a small single document into one target language. It accepts the document as part of the request, processes and translates the textual content, and returns the translated document as part of the response.
• Custom Translator
  • Description: Custom Translator is a feature of the Azure AI Translator service that enables enterprises, app developers, and language service providers to build customized neural machine translation (NMT) systems.
  • Key Features
    • Customize with parallel data: Build translation systems using parallel documents that understand the terminologies used in your own business and industry.
    • Customize with dictionary data: Build translation systems using bilingual dictionaries of terms used in your own business and industry.

Use Cases

• Webpage translation: Translate webpages to engage global audiences in their native language.
• Conversation translation: Break communication barriers by enabling live multi-lingual conversations in chat applications, customer support, and conferencing tools by providing real-time text and speech translation.
• Document translation: Translate manuals, marketing materials, documentation, product or service descriptions, specifications, instructions, contracts, etc. to execute business operations across the world.
• Accessibility: Translate live captions in a TV program or an event for user to follow in their native language.
• Education: Learn or teach a foreign language with ease. Facilitate cross-language communication in educational settings, enabling students, teachers, and parents to interact seamlessly in multiple languages.
• Social & entertainment: Engage with people worldwide on social media in your native language, learning new topics and sharing your thoughts. Join online gaming chats with players from different countries and watch movies or programs in foreign languages with subtitle translation.
• Digital investigation: Translate business intelligence content into a target language for consumption and analysis.

Benefits

• Global Reach: Translate content into over 100 languages, enabling businesses to communicate effectively with customers, partners, and employees worldwide.
• Scalable and Reliable: Built on Azure’s cloud infrastructure, the Translator service automatically scales to meet demand, from small business applications to global enterprise workloads.
• Security and Compliance: Azure AI Translator runs on Azure’s secure cloud infrastructure, ensuring data privacy and compliance with global standards. User data is not stored after the translation process.
• Customization: Customize translation models to suit your business-specific terminology and style, improving the accuracy of translations for specialized industries such as legal, medical, or technical fields.
• Easy Integration: Azure AI Translator service can be easily integrated into various applications through REST APIs and SDKs, making it accessible for developers across platforms.
• Availability: Azure AI Translator supports translation across over 100 languages. Enables translation of content in languages, for which native speakers and human translators are not available to you.
• Time: Translate content within seconds, minutes, or a few hours, which otherwise takes several days with human translation. Enables adoption of translation in workflow automation and real-time conversations.
• Cost: Translate large volumes of content at a fraction of the cost—up to 1,000 times less than traditional human translation—making it accessible even when high costs would normally be a barrier.

Technical Details

• Deployment: Azure AI Translator is available both as cloud and container offering. Translator container offering is gated and is available in connected (for billing only) and disconnected (for air gapped network) .
• Requirements: Azure AI Translator prerequisites differ based on the core features and the deployment environment. Please refer to the document for more information – Text Translation Overview , Document Translation Overview , Translator Container Overview , and Custom Translator Overview for specific requirements.
• Support: Azure AI Translator is part of Azure AI Services. Support options for AI Services can be found here: Azure AI services support and help options .

Pricing

Azure AI Translator offers competitive pricing. The pricing model includes pay-as-go and discounts based on volume commitments. Explore Azure AI Translator pricing options here .