Using multiple languages in Microsoft Teams

Collaborating with Microsoft Teams is very easy, and I’m using it at several customers. At one customer the teams are getting multi-language where before every conversation was in Dutch, now with new team members that are not speaking Dutch they have trouble going back into the conversations and do not understand what is written. Luckily Microsoft Teams now offers the ability like Skype to have translations for this.

We found that this was not enabled by default in the tenants that I worked checked. There are two ways to enable this, with the GUI and with PowerShell.

Enable thru the UI

For doing this, you need to go to the new Teams and Skype administration portal (https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/) There you have the messaging policy menu item (https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/policies/messaging), here you can enable this feature for the existing policy or create a new one.

The problem at both of my tenants and the one at my customer is that the default policies are not showing in the UI.

Enable thru PowerShell

Luckily this can also be achieved by PowerShell, for this, the Skype module is needed and is an installer instead of a module that you can download from this location: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39366

After having this installed, you can connect just as you do with Exchange, see the snippet below

After you are connected, you can use this snippet to enable translation

Running it this line to update them all gave me an error on “Tag:Default”, “Tag:EduFaculty” and “Tag:EduStudent”. The other policies like Global could be set.

Using it

After a few moments, the users can click on the three dots behind a message and translate that message to their language. You may need to sign-out of Microsoft Teams before the option is coming. In my case, it took some time, more than an hour.