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Why Bing Translate fails to translate a Chinese passage

Ryan 20 Reputation points
2025-07-08T02:23:27.3166667+00:00

Use the following interface to automatically detect the language and convert it to English: https://api.cognitive.microsofttranslator.com/translate?api-version=3.0&to=en：

[{"text":"赵分如明知是虎臣手脚，见他凶狠，那敢盘问？只得依他开病状，申报各司去迄。直待虎臣动身去后，方才备下棺木，掘起似道尸骸，重新殡殓，埋葬成坟，为文祭之。辞曰：呜呼！履斋死蜀，死于宗申；先生死闽，死于虎臣。哀哉，尚飨！那履斋是谁，姓吴名潜，是理宗朝的丞相。因贾似道谋代其位，造下谣言，诬之以罪，害他循州安置，却教循州知州刘宗申逼他服毒而死。今日似道下贬循州，未及到彼，先死于木绵庵，比吴潜之祸更惨。这四句祭文，隐隐说天理报应。赵分如虽然出于似道门下，也见他良心不泯处。闲话休题，再说似道既贬之后，家私田产，虽说入官，那葛岭大宅，谁人管业？高台曲池，日就荒落，墙颓壁倒，游人来观者，无不感叹，多有人题诗于门壁。今录得二首，诗云：深院无人草已荒，漆屏金字尚辉煌"}]

Returned result:

[{"detectedLanguage":{"language":"en","score":0.0},"translations":[{"text":"赵分如明知是虎臣手脚，见他凶狠，那敢盘问？只得依他开病状，申报各司去迄。 直待虎臣动身去后，方才备下棺木，掘起似道尸骸，重新殡殓，埋葬成坟，为文祭之。 辞曰：呜呼！履斋死蜀，死于宗申；先生死闽，死于虎臣。 哀哉，尚飨！那履斋是谁，姓吴名潜，是理宗朝的丞相。 因贾似道谋代其位，造下谣言，诬之以罪，害他循州安置，却教循州知州刘宗申逼他服毒而死。 今日似道下贬循州，未及到彼，先死于木绵庵，比吴潜之祸更惨。 这四句祭文，隐隐说天理报应。 赵分如虽然出于似道门下，也见他良心不泯处。 闲话休题，再说似道既贬之后，家私田产，虽说入官，那葛岭大宅，谁人管业？高台曲池，日就荒落，墙颓壁倒，游人来观者，无不感叹，多有人题诗于门壁。 今录得二首，诗云：深院无人草已荒，漆屏金字尚辉煌","to":"en"}]}]

How could Chinese be auto-detected as English? Is this a BUG?

Azure AI Translator
Azure AI Translator
An Azure service to easily conduct machine translation with a simple REST API call.
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  1. Amira Bedhiafi 41,121 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2025-10-27T14:53:25.6566667+00:00

    Hello Ryan !

    Thank you for posting on Microsoft Learn Q&A.

    It didn’t translate because auto-detect failed. What I understood is that you omitted from=..., so Translator tried to auto-detect the source language and the response shows detectedLanguage.language: "en" with score: 0.0. A score near 0 means detection failed and it had no confidence.

    FYI, some translator deployments fall back to a suggested source when detection fails and since the service then considered the source to be English and your target was also English, it simply echoed your original text back unchanged.

    You need to force the source language which means you need to explicitly add from=zh-Hans or from=zh-Hant if traditional and keep textType=plain.

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