Return N-Best Translations

Motivation

Generating artificial alternatives in translation, fully integrated with the collaborative translations framework (CTF). Return alternatives for sentences that have no alternatives in CTF, by adding artificial alternatives from the n-best list of the decoder.

Public API

The GetTranslations() and GetTranslationsArray() methods in the V2 API of Microsoft Translator include an optional Boolean flag "IncludeMultipleMTAlternatives".

The signature remains unchanged from the SDK. The method will return up to maxTranslations alternatives, even if there are not as many CTF entries available, where the delta is supplied from the n-best list of the translator engine.

The signature is:

Syntax
C# 
GetTranslationsResponse Microsoft.Translator.GetTranslations(appId, text, from, to, maxTranslations, options);

Parameters
Parameter Description

appId

Required. If the Authorization header is used, leave the appid field empty else specify a string containing "Bearer" + " " + access token.

text

Required. A string representing the text to translate. The size of the text must not exceed 10000 characters.

from

Required. A string representing the language code of the text to translate.

to

Required. A string representing the language code to translate the text into.

maxTranslations

Required. An int representing the maximum number of translations to return.

options

Optional. A TranslateOptions object that contains the values listed below. They are all optional and default to the most common settings.

  • Category: The only supported, and the default, option is "general".
  • ContentType: The only supported, and the default, option is "text/plain".
  • Uri: Filter results by this URI. If no value is set, the default is all.
  • User: Filter results by this user. If no value is set, the default is all.
  • State: User state to help correlate request and response. The same contents will be returned in the response.
  • IncludeMultipleMTAlternatives: flag to determine whether to return more than one alternatives from the MT engine. Default is false and includes only 1 alternative.

Ratings

The ratings are applied as follows:

  • The best automatic translation has a rating of 5.
  • The alternatives from CTF reflect the authority of the reviewer, from -10 to +10.
  • The automatically generated (n-best) translation alternatives have a rating of 0, and have a match degree of 100.

Number of Alternatives

The number of returned alternatives is up to maxTranslations, but may be less.


Language pairs

This functionality is not available for translations between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, both directions. It is available for all other Microsoft Translator supported language pairs.


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