Microsoft has today extended the real-time language translation support for its video calling platform, Skype. Japanese is the latest and tenth language which is now supported by Skype’s real-time voice translation tool. This means you can easily converse with a Japanese local over the platform and can have the language translated real-time for you and the local as well. Apart from Japanese, the platform supports English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Italian.
The company announced the news via an official blog post, which read as under,
Today, we are thrilled to announce another Skype Translator milestone: Skype users around the world will now be able to make real-time voice and video calls in Japanese, in addition to the nine other spoken languages.
It further mentioned that the language will also be available on all Microsoft Translation services, including Microsoft Translator Live. The support will especially benefit tourism and businesses in the island nation apart from regional communities, locals, and other Skype users.
This also celebrates the technological advancement within the app post its acquisition by Microsoft. Japanese is a relatively difficult language and requires a great amount of accuracy for perfect translations. It is mainly because of its entirely different grammatical structure and vocabulary. Efficient employment of artificial intelligence along with the integration of machine learning algorithms has enabled Microsoft to infuse the language within the systems.
To test out Japanese translations, simply click on the globe icon on its Windows desktop version or the Skype Translator button on Skype Preview app on Windows 10 and start chatting.
A support for 10 languages only within a span of two years is also worth noting. The tool was introduced only in 2014 with support for English and Spanish only for Skype calls. Over the time, along with introducing other 8 languages, it extended the reach of the tool to mobile and landline calls as well. Moreover, in the text-translation domain, it offers its services in about 61 languages. And given that Japan is a lucrative trading market, the extension of Japanese may give a decent push to its economy.
