Microsoft announces Document Translation feature in Azure Translator service

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the new Document Translation feature in Azure Translator service. As the name suggests, this new feature will allow organizations to translate documents to different languages while preserving structure and format in the original document. Since it is a asynchronous batch feature, organizations can submit a large number of documents in one go. Right now, this feature supports different file formats including Text, HTML, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook Message, PDF, etc.

Asynchronously, Document Translation pulls each document from the source location, recognizes the document format, applies right parsing technique to extract textual content in the document, translates the textual content into target languages. It then reconstructs the translated document preserving layout and format as present in the source documents, and stores translated document in a specified location.

“Translation of documents with rich formatting is a tricky business. We need the translation to be fluent and matching the context, while maintaining high fidelity in the visual appearance of complex documents. Document Translation is designed to address those goals, relieving client applications from having to disassemble and reassemble the documents after translation, making it easy for developers to build workflows that process full documents with a few simple steps.”, said Chris Wendt, Principal Program Manager.

Document translation feature will cost $15 per million chars.

Source: Microsoft