
Statistical modeling techniques and efficient algorithms help the computer address the problem of decipherment (detecting the correspondences between source and target language in the training data) and decoding (finding the best translation of a new input sentence). So-called “parallel corpora” act as a modern Rosetta Stone in massive proportions, providing word, phrase, and idiomatic translations in context for many language pairs and domains. Rather than writing hand-crafted rules to translate between languages, modern translation systems approach translation as a problem of learning the transformation of text between languages from existing human translations and leveraging recent advances in applied statistics and machine learning. Translator’s implementation of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) is built on more than a decade of natural-language research at Microsoft. The Translator service is an Azure service hosted in Microsoft data centers and benefits from the security, scalability, reliability, and nonstop availability that other Microsoft cloud services also receive.

Leveraging industry standard REST technology, the developer sends source text (or audio for speech translation) to the service with a parameter indicating the target language, and the service sends back the translated text for the client or web app to use. Translator can be used in web or client applications on any hardware platform and with any operating system to perform language translation and other language-related operations such as language detection, text to speech, or dictionary. This same service is also accessible, at no additional cost, from within familiar Microsoft products such as Bing, Cortana, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint, Skype, and Yammer. It is incorporated across product localization, support, and online communication teams. Translator is used extensively within Microsoft. Translator has been used by Microsoft groups since 2007 and is available as an API for customers since 2011.

Machine translation systems are applications or online services that use machine-learning technologies to translate large amounts of text from and to any of their supported languages.
