Presentation Translator

Display live, translated subtitles as you speak while giving audience members the opportunity to follow along in their own language, on their own device.

Presentation Translator
“Translator gives me the opportunity to reach my students in a way I never could before. I love seeing their faces light up when they realize they actually understand the message I’m trying to get across. They can participate in class discussions like never before.”
Kacie Solar, Humanities Teacher, Mill Creek MS

About Presentation Translator

Presentation Translator broke down language barriers by allowing users to offer live, subtitled presentation straight from PowerPoint. As you spoke, the add-in powered by the Microsoft Translator live feature, allowed you to display subtitles directly on your PowerPoint presentation in any one of more than 60 supported text languages. This feature could also be used for audiences who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Additionally, up to 100 audience members in the room could follow along with the presentation in their own language, including the speaker’s language, on their phone, tablet or computer.

After originally launching in The Garage, Presentation Translator was introduced as a standalone app in the Microsoft Store before many of the features were added natively to PowerPoint.

KEY FEATURES:

Live subtitling: Speak in any of the 11 supported speech languages – Arabic (Modern Standard and Levantine dialect), Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish – and subtitle into any one of the 70+ text translation languages.

Personal translations: Share a QR- or five letter conversation code and your audience can follow along with your presentation, on their own device, in their chosen language.

Inclusivity through Accessibility: Help audience members who are deaf or hard of hearing follow the presentation and participate in the discussion.

Video

Chinook Middle School engages with its community using Microsoft Translator Watch how Chinook Middle School is using Microsoft Translator which has allowed faculty and staff to better engage with their student, parent, and family communities, marking them a part of the conversation.

Journey

In December 2016, our team launched the Translator live feature which lets users have live, translated conversations in real-time. We’re the first to offer real-time translation, giving people a personal universal translator directly from their mobile device when connected to the internet.

We saw how powerful this technology was and how it’s a valuable resource when language is a barrier, so we leveraged this technology and incorporated it into Presentation Translator for PowerPoint.

Partnering with the Garage to launch Presentation Translator gave us the opportunity to reach a broader audience of tech enthusiasts, collect feedback, iterate, and implement feature requests that shaped the add-in as it exists today.

After launching in July 2017, the add-in was quickly adopted by PowerPoint users in different use cases.

Presentation Translator was initially developed to translate a speaker’s presentation into other 60 languages. For example, if you speak English and want to translate your presentation into Japanese, you can choose Japanese subtitles and it will capture your audio and translate it on the screen.

We knew from the work our team did integrating Microsoft’s speech translation into Skype (aka Skype Translator) that this was also potentially very interesting for accessibility scenarios.

So, we proactively reached-out to contacts in the education space to use the add-in for a different use case in classroom environments: captioning for hearing impaired students.

A couple of months after launch, customers such as Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) adopted the use of Presentation Translator in a few pilot classrooms. It’s proven to be an invaluable resource for not only deaf or hard of hearing students, but also for international students and to provide class notes for all students.

The features of Presentation Translator were integrated natively into PowerPoint beginning in 2019 before Presentation Translator was retired in 2020.

The Translator team hopes to continue our mission to provide translation technologies like Presentation Translator, to break language barriers and provide a means to accessible communication regardless of the language, use-case, app, and device used.

Team

Presentation Translator team photo

Presentation Translator team:
(from left to right) Tanvi Surti, Xuedong Huang, Michael Seltzer, Chris Wendt, Huaming Wang, Arul Menezes, Igor Syrisko, Sundar Poudel, Kevin Vu, Christophe Poulain, Ivo Santos, Lauren Dapiaoen

Not pictured:
Laurent Bussard, Pradip Fatehpuria, Ralph El Hage, Will Lewis, Olivier Nano, Jeff Stock