Microsoft Teams now translates over 100 languages in chats

You can no longer pretend not to understand what your international colleagues are saying during meetings on Microsoft Teams when they send you a message. 

This week, the company released an Intelligent Message Translation feature in chat messages for iOS and Android mobile devices. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and translate a user’s preferred language.

When participants chat in different languages, the feature gives you the option to customise your preferences so messages come through in your preferred language. Users may either automate the feature so all messages come through in their preferred language, or only activate the feature if they get a message in a language they don’t understand. Teams offers a prompt to translate a message if it picks up a language not generally in use.

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If you prefer a language, and Teams prompts you to translate it to something else, tapping “never translate’ for the particular language will add the language to the ‘Never Translate’ list. In this context, ‘never’ means until you change your mind. You can change your settings when and if you change your mind.

“By default, your translation language will be set to the language of your computer,” says Microsoft.

Teams can translate over 100 languages, including Zulu, Afrikaans, and Swahili.