Microsoft and Amazon Announce Similar New Machine Translation Features a Day Apart

The week before the Memorial Day 2023 holiday in the United States saw both Microsoft and Amazon roll out new features to their enterprise machine translation client base.

First, during the latest Microsoft Build event, the Microsoft Translator unit announced a batch document translation feature on May 23, 2023. The functionality is available in Language Studio and is intended for enterprise users, who can now translate directly from local networks or repositories, instead of having to upload files to a cloud.

On the same day, the group also announced a public preview of  Microsoft Translator V3 connector and Text Translator SDK. The Translator V3 Connector automates text and document translation within a workflow, be it in different clouds or locally, calls or emails, and other supported apps. Microsoft says the SDK reduces complexity for developers as well as “the need to assimilate API definitions.”

Other concurrent announcements included plugins and tools that at this time are available only as private previews. These include a plugin that allows translation of a source text “between any of the 125+ languages and dialects supported by Azure Cognitive Services Translator service.”

Amazon Unveils Document Translation on the Fly

A day later, on May 24, Amazon announced that a feature of its Translate product that handles document translation in real time is now “generally available.”

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Although Amazon Translate supports translation between 75 high and low-resource languages, with up to 5,550 possible translation combinations, this new feature is limited to source and target combinations that include English. It is also only available in 16 AWS commercial regions.  

The newly launched feature enables translation of HTML and text documents on the fly without the need to extract text before translating or any other prep work. It is also possible now to translate without having to reformat target language documents.

This functionality is accessible through APIs or the AWS console, and users can currently submit translation requests for the supported file types and languages in sizes up to 100KB.