Microsoft's 'Teams' platform will now support eight Indian languages

Microsoft has rolled out support for eight Indian languages in its hub for teamwork called Teams. Strong support for Hindi has been added to Teams on Desktop and Web while the application's mobile version has been localized in eight Indian languages, namely- Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.

In a statement, the company said that the move is a part of ‘its efforts to make communication and collaboration easier at the workplace and empower employees who prefer to work in local languages’.

By using Microsoft Teams, organizations can avoid using an array of disparate apps and move to a single, secure hub that brings together processes such as chat, meetings, calling and content sharing. Teams enjoys native integration to the Office 365 apps while users can also customize and extend their experience with third-party apps, processes, and devices.

Teams on desktop and web

Teams provides seamless text input support for all Indian languages active on a desktop and users can leverage interesting stickers in their own language as well. Most of such assets come with native Hindi translations, however the company said that users can also edit them for creativity.

Microsoft's localization approach has been to use simple and popular Hindi words instead of Sanskritized forms.

In an AI-powered feature, Microsoft has also added real-time inline translation to Teams chats where text can be translated between Hindi and other world languages including English. Another important feature is Hindi support for 'Immersive Reader', the popular accessibility feature of the application. Following this, Teams can also read out messages received in Hindi.

Teams on mobile devices

According to Microsoft, users can change the UI of Teams in iOS and Android by setting the default language of their operating system on iOS and Operating systems. This will lead to a localized UI provided the language chosen is one of the eight Indian languages, ie.  Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam. On mobile devices, Team's display language is determined by the default language of iOS or Android operating systems. However, text input is not limited to these languages as the user can type in any language of his/her choice, supported on the OS.