The PointFire Blog
The PointFire Blog
Tips on using SharePoint in a multilingual environment

Supporting another 12 Languages

17.06.20 02:06 AM Comment(s) By Martin Laplante

In the most recent version of PointFire Translator (beta) we are introducing new or enhanced support for 12 new languages.


Of these, four are languages that are supported by SharePoint.  Irish and Kazakh languages are now supported for machine translation.  That means if your SharePoint site supports Irish or Kazakh, PointFire Translator can now translate its pages, documents, and lists, and PointFire 365 will automatically filter and/or redirect as appropriate.  If you want to translate the user interface, contact us, one of the steps is different for those languages than for other languages.

PointFire Translator now supports European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese as two separate languages.  Before this, the same translation engine was used for both, a neutral Portuguese that was actually closer to the Brazilian version.

Several new languages have been added to PointFire Translator which are not supported by SharePoint, including Māori (New Zealand), and five languages from India and Pakistan: Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada.  PointFire Translator will happily translate to or from those non-SharePoint languages, but PointFire 365 will be unable to filter by that language code.

All of those new languages have Neural Network engines behind them.  Irish, Brazilian Portuguese, Marathi, Gujarathi, and Māori have a customizable engine, meaning you can re-train it with your own documents to improve the translation quality.
The other two languages, or rather one language and two scripts, are ones that PointFire Translator had supported before and which had stopped working and discontinued.  In preparation for the Galactic Collaboration Summit we decided to brush off our Klingon translator.  This is where we discovered that there had been an undocumented change to Microsoft's Klingon language codes.  So we are happy to announce that we have reinstated Klingon (Latin script) and Klingon (pIqaD script).  If you choose the pIqaD script, make sure that you download a font that supports it, and change the font on the document.  This language only has a statistical translation engine, not a neural translation engine, so the quality is not very good.  But to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.

If you're keeping count, that is 73 languages in total.

Martin Laplante

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