It's been a busy week at PointFire, with three version releases.  Version 2.2.3 of PointFire 365 came out, with several improvements, the much anticipated version 1.1.0 of PointFire Power Translator, and the final beta of PointFire 2019.  PointFire 2019 v1.0 was scheduled to be released this week, but instead it still remains in beta.  The reason: SharePoint 2019's Machine Translation Service is broken.

The list of deprecated features for SharePoint 2019 was clear; it said "The Machine Translation Service will remain supported but deprecated for the SharePoint Server 2019 release."  But version after version, farm after farm, we could never get the service to work on SharePoint 2019 farms.  Finally a week ago our support ticket with Microsoft reached a conclusion:  the Machine Translation Service does not work.  At all, under any configuration they tried.  The product group is aware.

PointFire 2019 has the option of using the Machine Translation Service for certain translations.  The other option (besides, you know, humans) is to use PointFire Power Translator with its better speed, accuracy, scriptability and flexibility.  The benefit of the Machine Translation Service is that it is free.  But we can't release something with a feature that we never fully tested.  Microsoft might, but not us.  So PointFire 2019 is still officially in beta, and we will see in a few weeks whether we remove the option or whether SharePoint 2019 gets fixed.