The PointFire Blog - The PointFire Blog for Multilingual SharePoint , Teams LocalizationThe PointFire Blog - The PointFire Blog for Multilingual SharePoint , Teams Localizationhttps://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/teams-localizationWed, 16 Jul 2025 12:57:21 -0700http://zoho.com/sites/<![CDATA[Microsoft Teams Translation and Language Features - Part 4 of 4]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/microsoft-teams-translation-language-features-part4

What does not localize

This is a shorter post than the previous ones.  It is mostly a list of things that do not localize or change their language with the user in Teams.  It feels a bit negative to harp on the negative, but it can also save you some time to know that there is no point in continuing to look for a way to do it.

  • Channel names other than “General”, see part 1
  • Tab names other than Out-Of-The-Box tab names like “Posts” and “Files”
  • Wikis.  These are kept is a specialized library called “Teams Wiki Data” with specialized “.mht” files.  No localization is possible.
  • Localization of Approvals, etc.  Approvals and other workflows are built on top of Power Platform.  They are not multilingual
  • Setting date and time format, other than display language.  That is possible to a degree by the user selecting their own display language.
  • Chat and Calendar now use OS format (May 2021)  The user can’t modify them
  • SharePoint pages within Teams.  SharePoint offers some ability to redirect users to a page based on their language, but only on specially configured Communication sites.  This is not available out of the box on Teams sites
  • Certain automatic posts in chat, for example when a meeting is planned, a tab added, and so forth.  These will be posted to everyone in the language of the user who carried out the action
  • Files tabs can have a variety of languages which cannot be changed.  In the following example, the top line “Nouveau” and “Charger” is in French because that is the user’s language, the library name “Documenten” and column name “Naam” is in Dutch because that is the SharePoint site’s current language for this user, and the folder “Recordings” is in English because that was the language of the first user who recorded a meeting
  • For Teams templates that have lists, the lists are unilingual see this post
  • Voice prompts
  • Link preview for multilingual external sites.  For example if you have post with a link to Twitter or YouTube, it will show a preview in the language of the user who created the link.
  • Most apps. One exception is MS Forms, which can itself be multilingual.  However the language codes must match exactly.  For example if the MS-Forms language is set to French (France) and the Teams user language to French (Canada), or vice-versa, they do not match and you will probably see the form in English instead.  For certain languages, there is no match possible.  For example, MS-Forms supports one version, “Deutsch” while Teams supports one version “Deutsch (Deutschland)” and they are not considered an exact match.
]]>Thu, 23 Dec 2021 11:27:04 -0500<![CDATA[Microsoft Teams Translation and Language Features - Part 3 of 4]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/microsoft-teams-translation-language-features-part3Microsoft Teams is all about voice: voice in calls, in video meetings, in presentations. Translating voice requires two or three components: speech to text in the language of the speaker, then text translation, possibly followed by text to speech in the other language.]]>

Voice translation

Microsoft Teams is all about voice: voice in calls, in video meetings, in presentations.  Translating voice requires two or three components: speech to text in the language of the speaker, then text translation, possibly followed by text to speech in the other language.


Currently, the only general solution recommended by Microsoft is to use the Microsoft Translator app.  Open Teams and start the call, then go to translator.microsoft.com or translate.it if you are on the desktop or start the Translator app if you are on Android or iOS or Amazon. The speaker will use the “Start Conversation” and select their language, and Translator will generate a 5-character conversation code that can be sent to participants.  Each participant can go to the site or the app and enter the conversation code and their own language. Different participants can follow along with real time translations in their language and even speak each in their own language.

There are also a few other settings that can change the experience, for example adding text-to-speech on the end of the translation, or saving a transcript.


Each participant will have two windows open: Teams and Translator.  There isn’t any integration with Microsoft Teams, the Translator app simply piggybacks on the same microphone.  The Translator app offers little security or privacy, anyone who has or guesses the 5-letter code can listen in on the conversation.

There are also some Speech-to-Text and translation bits of functionality within Teams, and it is inching closer to a complete integrated solution.

Live Captions Vs Live Transcripts

Two Speech-to-text options are available within Teams, and they are very similar: live captions, and live transcripts.


Live captions uses the Closed Captions standard.  It is available during the meeting but it is not recorded.  There were other differences in the past but they are moot now that storage has moved from Stream/Exchange to OneDrive.


Live Transcripts work like live captions, but when recording is on, live transcripts are stored as text files alongside the video file.  These transcripts are searchable, and include speaker attribution and times


Live captions and live transcripts are governed by two different policies that must be set on the tenant.

Live Captions

Live captions works with all Teams meetings, and is available under most licenses.  Until July 2021 it worked when the speaker language was English (US) only, but now it has added support for different flavours of English and for other languages, including


  • English (Canada), English (India), English (United Kingdom), English (Australia), English (New Zealand)
  • Dutch (Netherlands), Dutch (Belgium),
  • French (France), French (Canada),
  • Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico),
  • Chinese (Cantonese, Traditional), Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified)
  • Arabic (United Arab Emirates), Arabic (Saudi Arabia)
  • German (Germany), Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese (Japan), Hindi (India), Italian (Italy), Korean (Korea), Swedish (Sweden), Polish (Poland), Danish (Denmark), Finnish (Finland), Norwegian (Norway), Russian (Russia)


Only someone from the organizer’s tenant can turn on live captions, but anyone who can see the meeting can see the captions during the meeting.

Live Transcripts

Availability of Live Transcripts has been vastly expanded in August 2021.  Originally it required E3/E5 licenses, but it was added to the other types of license in August. Originally it was just for scheduled meetings but it was expanded to all meetings in August.  It was originally not available in channel meetings or Meet now meetings, but it is.

Originally it was available only when the spoken language is U.S. English, but it is now rolling out in the same languages as live captions


The feature is available on the installed desktop version of Teams.  The text appears beside the video, with speaker name, unless they choose to hide it.  Microsoft Search can find the recording based on text in the transcript, as long as the meeting was recorded. When meeting is recorded, the transcript is stored with it.



The transcript is a text file, which you can download as .docx or .vtt file.  Only people from the same tenant can download transcripts.  It includes time codes and the name of speaker.



Although it supports transcription in multiple languages, it does not support real time translation between languages yet.  This has been promised for a very long time, see the User Voice entry above, but also note the date over two years ago.


Translation of PowerPoint Live

There are some parts of Teams where real time translation is available.


If the speaker is using PowerPoint Live, then since July participants can translate the content of the slides to one of 19 languages.  Please note that this is different from the old Presentation Translator add-in for PowerPoint, which has been retired and is no longer supported.  That add-in also translated voice on the fly, which this does not do.


Translation in Teams Live Events

Real-time voice translation is available in Teams Live Events.  This is the feature with the best voice translation support in all of Teams.

To use this feature, enable it in “Live Event Policies” in the Teams Admin center.  Under Meetings > Live events policies, edit the Global policy or add a new one.



In that policy, turn on 'Allow Transcription for Attendees’



When creating a Live Event, the organizer should select “Captions”, then choose


  • 1 spoken language - English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or Swedish.
  • Up to 6 translation languages - Afrikaans, Arabic, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified, PRC), Creole, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Querétaro Otomi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Serbian (Latin), Serbian Cyrillic, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tahitian, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, or Yucatec Maya.


During the meeting, producers can turn on live captions.  Then attendees can choose caption language from among those that the organizers has made available.  Like some of the other Teams speech-to-text features, curse words will be starred out.


Only the producer has access to the transcript for download afterwards.


Stay tuned for part 4!

Related Posts

]]>Thu, 09 Sep 2021 09:00:00 -0400<![CDATA[Microsoft Teams Translation and Language Features - Part 2 of 4]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/microsoft-teams-translation-language-features-part2In Part 1, we found that the language of certain Teams elements that are hosted in the SharePoint site depend on the user’s current site language. When it comes to invitations, the Outlook language settings of different users often have a major effect on the language of the invitation emails.]]>

Invitations and Chat

Meeting Invitations

In Part 1, we found that the language of certain Teams elements that are hosted in the SharePoint site depend on the user’s current site language.  When it comes to invitations, the Outlook language settings of different users often have a major effect on the language of the invitation emails.


If you invite someone to a meeting from within Teams, then the language of the invitation is based on the inviter user’s Teams UI language.


If you invite someone to a meeting from within Outlook, then the language of the invitation is based on the user mailbox settings of the inviter.


In this image, the inviter’s language is French, the SharePoint site is Dutch, the receiver is German.  It is the language of the sender that determines the language of the invitation.


In this email, the text of the email is in French, at lease from “Réunion Microsoft Teams” on, because that is the language of the inviter.  Some of the details at the top are in German.  This is because the email has an attached ICS file, and Outlook is the one that expands the information in that file to readable format, using the user’s language.


The Teams roadmap says that soon admins will be able set a policy regarding the languages of the invitation.


Not much information has been released about how this will work.

O365 Group Invitations

There are many, many different ways of creating an Office 365 group: in Outlook, in Teams, in SharePoint, and in many other products.  These always create a SharePoint site for the group, and this site is created with the language of the tenant.  There is an exception, when a modern Team site is created from within SharePoint and connected to a Group, you can select the site language.


The group mailbox of the group, however, typically has language of the mailbox matching that of the group’s creator.  This mailbox language determines the language of group invitations, according to documentation & blogs.  However, in my experience, invitations are usually in the language of the tenant.  Sometimes, not always, the invitation is in the current Outlook language of the person who adds them to the group.  That is to say, if I change my Outlook language from English to Spanish then invite someone else to the group, they may get the invitation in English, or they might get it in Spanish.  I haven’t fully figured out the pattern. Why I get different results than others is still a bit of a mystery.

Translation of messages

When you look at chat and channel messages, you usually get the option to translate individual messages to your language.


This has to be done for each message individually, not for the entire conversation.  Above the message, next to the emojis you can click on the three dots and translation is one of the options.


The translation will attempt to auto-detect the source language of the message.  It will translate to your Teams configured language (desktop or browser), or to the configured translation language (mobile).  On both Android and IOS your UI language is not configurable, it is the same as the language of the OS, but the translation target language is configurable.  On desktop and browser versions, the UI language is configurable, but the target language for translation is necessarily the same as the UI language.  Channel message translation is only available on desktop, not on mobile.  You can have different target languages on desktop & mobile, or on different mobile devices.


The option to translate is on by default for Teams, but that was not always the case.  Admins can turn on or off the translate option by policy.



Translation can be turned on in PowerShell using the command


Set-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy -AllowUserTranslation


Alternatively, you can go to the Microsoft Teams admin center

https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/dashboard


then select Messaging Policies, and turn “Translate messages” on.

Immersive Reader

Another way to translate chat and some other parts of Teams is using the Immersive Reader.  Originally a tool to help people learning a second language, it is useful for many things including translation.


It can be turned on or off in Teams by policy.  In the image above, it is just below the “Translate messages” setting.  Among the settings that the user can set is the ability to translate to one of a ridiculous number of languages.

Like for translation, click on the three dots next to the emojis above the message, and immersive reader is right under the translation entry.  Select the translation language and turn on “Document” translation.


The translator in Immersive Reader tries to auto-detect the language of the entire passage, then has the option to read it out loud in that language or the translation language.


This is a great language learning tool, now (soon) on mobile too.

Spell checking language

As you are typing in the chat, Teams normally assumes you are typing in the app’s default language and it offers spell checking advice.  If you are running on the desktop app it also looks at your Windows keyboard language for a hint. 


That’s good if you are typing in that language, but what if you’re not?  On the Windows desktop app, after several posts it might autodetect the language you are typing in and propose to switch the spell checker to it.



This is client-side functionality, the language detection and the spell checking on the desktop version depends on the Office installation on that machine and the language dictionaries that have been installed.


Stay tuned for part 3: Voice Translation

Related Posts

]]>Mon, 30 Aug 2021 17:05:37 -0400<![CDATA[Microsoft Teams Translation and Language Features - Part 1 of 4]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/microsoft-teams-translation-language-features-part1There have been many recent changes and announcements regarding the translation and language features of Microsoft Teams. Here are the ins and outs of background, UI and tab]]>

Background, UI and Tab

Background

There have been many recent changes and announcements regarding the translation and language features of Microsoft Teams.  It’s hard to keep up.  Teams is big.  It has text, it has voice, and very often some features that work with one type of chat or one type of group video don’t work in other similar looking chats or group video.

Much of what you see in Teams is stored within a SharePoint site or some other Office 365 component.  Office 365 and SharePoint in particular follow a common language setting from the user profile which overrides the browser language setting.  There are good capabilities for localizing content and user interface in SharePoint, which also generally cover OneDrive and Lists.  However, the Teams Desktop and Mobile applications have a language setting of their own, independent of Office 365.  If you have several different Teams apps on different devices, they can each have their own language setting.

As a result, the language of UI elements and of content elements within Teams can depend on:

  • The app language setting

  • The SharePoint team site’s language setting, which itself depends on the user’s Office 365 profile

  • The Outlook language setting of individuals who created the team or the group, or the meeting invitation

Localization of UI element

Certain user interface elements in Teams are localized, which means they will be shown in different languages based on the language of the user.  Others are not.  Let’s go through the list

Chrome

The “chrome” is localized. The language setting of the app determines what language the application interface is shown in.  For the Windows app and for the browser version, you can change the Teams user language preference, and it will stay in that language even if you set a different language in a different device or app.  For the mobile apps, you can’t set the language directly, it will follow the language of the device’s operating system.

Team name

Maybe localized? We’re only at the second item and it’s already one I’m not sure about.  Bear with me, this isn’t an entire post of me saying I don’t know.  Every team in Teams has a corresponding SharePoint site. The team name comes from the SharePoint site name, and SharePoint site names support MUI, meaning if you change your SharePoint language and view the Team site that is associated with that team in SharePoint, it will show a localized version of the site name.  On occasion I have been surprised to see the team name in Teams change to a different language version, but that is the exception rather than the rule.  If you edit the Team name while in Teams, it will change it name of the SharePoint site and reset the localization of the site name in all languages.  Changing the site name or localizations within SharePoint often changes the team name within Teams.  The pattern may be that the team name is changed to the language-specific name of the site in whatever language the site name was edited last.

Channel name

Channel names are not localized except the built-in “General” channel.  Channel names become folders in the SharePoint site’s Document library, and folders cannot be localized.  Private channels become SharePoint site names, which are theoretically localizable but in practice this localization is not reflected in Teams.  It creates a site whose name is language-dependent, even though it is not reflected in Teams itself, and the language dependency is not useful.  When I created a private channel named “private” for the “Contoso Corp.” team, while my language was Dutch, it created a separate SharePoint site with its name localized.  The names were:
Dutch:“Teamkanaal”

English:“Contoso Corp. - private”

French:“Contoso Corp. - private”

However when I ran it again, all three names were the same.  Some experiments with different Teams and user languages might shed some light, but clearly it isn’t localized in any useful way.

Tab name

Out-Of-The-Box tab names like “Posts” and “Files” are localized, custom ones are not. The language of the OOTB tab names depends on the Teams app language setting.

Command bar

If you change your Teams language, the commands that you can type into the command bar get localized.  To change your status to "be right back" in Teams, type "/brb" in the command bar, if your language is English. In German, you must type "/bingleichzüruck", and in French "/de-retour-dans-quelques-minutes", which means "by the time I’ve typed this I'm back".

Files Tab

The Files tab in Teams is a fair facsimile of SharePoint’s modern list view webpart, and of the view of the list goes to the folder of the Documents library whose name corresponds to the current channel.  You will notice in the image that it is partly in French, partly in English and partly in Dutch.  “Nouveau” and “Charger” are in French because that is the current language of the user’s Teams app. “Documenten” and “Naam” are in Dutch, because that is the current user language of the user on the SharePoint site.  The “General” is in English because that was the language at the time of creation of the team and “Recordings” is in English because that was the language of the first user to record a meeting.

SPFx tabs

There is a longer explanation of how the localization of the content SPFx webparts in Teams works

http://blog.icefire.ca/post/localization-of-spfx-webparts-in-microsoft-teams-tabs

SPFx tabs localization works like the localization of SPFx webpart localization in SharePoint.

The framework lets you create a set of JavaScript files with names like “en-us.js” with a JavaScript object that contains all the strings that your app needs.  The one that is loaded at run time is the one whose language matches the user language.

In SharePoint, this depends on your current SharePoint language setting. In Teams, this also depends on your current SharePoint language setting, not the Teams app setting.

What you get is a tab whose language matches the SharePoint language setting, while the rest of the page uses the Teams language setting.  This is the general rule for any Teams tab that comes from SharePoint, and it includes some of the tab’s settings interface.  For example, here is a SharePoint webpart settings screen, when the Teams language is English and the SharePoint language is Dutch.  The words “About” and “Save” are in English, but that’s about it.  The rest is in Dutch, to match the SharePoint site.  Even the site name uses the Dutch version of the name “Contoso N.V.” rather than the English “Contoso Corp.” team name.

Related Posts

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