Microsoft Translator gets Gaelic so we can communicate with more of the Irish
With St. Patrick's Day fast approaching (March 17), many of us will soon be eating traditional Irish cuisine, such as corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and soda bread. There are sure to be many people wearing the color green as well. On this day, we celebrate all things Irish.
But what if you want to hold a conversation with an authentic Irish person on that holiday (or any other day for that matter)? If the person prefers to speak Gaelic, rather than English, this can be a big problem. Thankfully, Microsoft has come up with a solution. Using its popular Translator service, you can now communicate with those that speak Gaelic -- just use your smartphone to convert words and hold a conversation!
"Our ongoing mission to break down language barriers continues with Irish: Today, we have added Irish Gaelic to Microsoft Translator. Irish Gaelic, usually referred to as the Irish Language or just Irish, and commonly known in Irish itself as Gaeilge (pronounced 'gwael-guh'), is the latest addition to the Microsoft Translator family of languages. This brings Irish to all scenarios powered by Microsoft Translator, including Custom Translator, which helps customers to build translation systems for domain-specific terminology and style," says Microsoft.
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The Windows-maker further says, "Neural machine translation technology has recently achieved impressive quality gains, characterized by highly fluent and accurate output, even for low-resourced languages such as Gaeilge. Using deep learning, we have iteratively refined our machine translation models. With today’s release, our commitment to deliver high-quality machine translation for Gaeilge moves to the next stage, as we prepare to continuously improve translation quality based on feedback from our users."
Do you plan to use Microsoft Translator to speak to Irish people? Do you have any friends or family that only speak Gaelic? Please tell me in the comments below.
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