An international customer recently came to us with a minor but challenging request: enable users to translate to English the names of vendors containing Chinese characters. This currently works in their old (non-Power BI) web app using built-in translation in the Chrome browser through the Chrome context menu, which you can do with pretty much any text on any web page.
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| Chrome context menu, with Translate selection to English |
(Note: This was portrayed as a one-off task, while I realize a superior solution would be to translate the values in the source.)
In Power BI, it's not possible to highlight text in a report and bring up your browser's native context menu, so they couldn't continue their current translation workflow. No matter what, right-clicking brings up a Power BI-specific context menu.
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| Power BI report context menu, right-clicking a cell in a table |
Chris Webb's recent post, Text Analysis With Power BI Copilot, gave me the idea for solving the problem. In this case, the solution is so simple using the smart narrative visual with Copilot that the picture tells 1000 words.
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| Smart narrative visual using Copilot with instructions to translate |
Chris has been killing it lately with Fabric and especially AI/Copilot content on his site (Crossjoin), but I'm guessing if you're reading this, you already read it. See Chris' post for more limitations, but the big one is that it requires a Fabric capacity and does use some CUs.
A caveat I found not mentioned in Chris' post is that it doesn't always generate the same result for the same input -- I assume based on randomness/"creativity" of the underlying AI.
Well, except in the case below. No matter what I try, the AI always says its favorite type of muffin is blueberry.
