How to Use Microsoft Translator Advanced Offline Languages
Microsoft just updated its Translator app for iOS , Android and Amazon Fire devices to support new optimized language packs that are (supposedly) 23 percent better at helping you figure out how to say “where is the bathroom” on your next vacation. They also take up about half the space on your phone when you download them – a wise move since you don’t want to get stuck without being able to ask for directions if you get lost on your travels.
Microsoft said in a press release that you’ll have to wait until the end of this week to download the updated language packs for iOS, but you shouldn’t listen to that. As it turns out, Apple seems to have expedited Microsoft’s update approval process, and you can download updated packages for Android, iOS, and your Amazon Fire devices right now – both Google Play and the App Store offer version 3.2. Translator application.
How to download and use the new language translator packs
After you have updated the Microsoft Translator app to the latest version, download it. If you are using iOS, tap the gear icon in the lower right corner and tap the “Offline languages” option in the settings screen; If you are using Android, tap the three dots icon in the upper right corner and select Offline Languages.
On the screen that appears, select the languages you want to download for offline access. You have a fairly extensive list to choose from – 44 languages in total. However, at the time of this writing, only eleven of them support neural machine translation: Arabic, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai.
Microsoft says it will add more language packs in the future, but does not indicate in the app which language packs are new and which are not. To do this, you will need to check out Microsoft’s not entirely clear website .
As always, you won’t be able to talk to your device and translate what you say offline. Unfortunately, Microsoft offline translation only works with print. Microsoft claims that the quality of its offline language packs with neural machine translation algorithms should almost match its online neural machine translation, and we didn’t see much difference in our (admittedly meager) tests: