Machine Translation Service, Variations are on the way out

30.06.18 08:07 AM Comment(s) By Martin Laplante

Update for Machine Translation Services from SharePoint Online

MC143381

Plan For Change

Published On : 28 June 2018

We will be removing the user interface entry point for Machine Translation Services from SharePoint Online, beginning September 2018.

How does this affect me?

With this change, your organization will no longer be able to perform manual, on demand translation service activities in SharePoint Online. This change will affect your user's ability to create new variation labels in order to schedule translation activities or workflows. The update will not affect your user's ability to leverage Multilingual User Interface (MUI) capabilities in SharePoint Online or its related APIs. Also, it will not impact any previously created variation labels or the ability to schedule translation activities or workflows based on previously created variation labels. After this change is made, your users will not be able to create new variation labels.

This sounds the death knell for machine translation of Variations, and probably Variations itself. Already, modern sites like Communication sites and Team sites cannot use Variations, and the Machine Translation API does not work on modern pages. When this announcement says "your users will not be able to create new variation labels", it is referring to classic sites.

The only remaining alternative for multilingual sites in SharePoint Online will be to use PointFire 365 and PointFire Power Translator, which work on modern sites and pages, including modern communication sites, because they don't rely on Variations or the Machine Translation Service.

The announcement also says "Instead of using on-demand, manual translation services, we recommend your organization use Bing translation API’s."

Why don't you try that? The rest of us will wait here. And by the way it's now called the Microsoft Translator Text API. You're back! All sorts of error messages? Come back when you've done all the buffering, parsing, and escaping to have it run error-free. Back again? And hardly anything translated? Yes, most of the text on the page isn't in the aspx file in translatable form. You need to use PointFire Power Translator, no other Microsoft or third party tool does it.

Update: see this discussion about what this announcement meant about "your users will not be able to create new variation labels." https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/SharePoint-Online-Variations-alternative/td-p/212239

Machine Translation Service, Variations are on the way out

How does this affect me?

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