Facebook has become the world’s leading social network, boasting 1.5 billion users every month. The company announced the launch of its new translation tool that will allow users to compose statuses in a multitude of 45 languages. The multilingual tool is set to reach a vast amount of customers worldwide with the goal to ease the reading on their News Feed.
The new feature, coined ‘multilingual composer’, will translate text into any of the specified languages open to the user’s choice. This implies that a writer of a post can compose it in English, for example, then it can appear in another language for his or her Facebook friends of a different native tongue. The same writer can even choose to edit the translated post, adding his or her flavor instead of purely relying on the machine-generated text.
What is remarkable about the feature is that it uses machine learning to display a user’s preferred language. Therefore, if a given user’s language setting is French, the posts available for him or her to read will be presented in that language.
This is particularly beneficial for more business-related pages, which could give entrepreneurs and organizations the ability to be more relatable to potential clients/customers. Furthermore, it may allow for such pages to determine how many responses it receives in what languages, consequently specifying its marketing strategies according to the different socio-linguistic spheres that make up their followers.
Users who can speak more than one language no longer have to compose an essay of a status. It is not uncommon to see Facebook page’s status quartering it into the different languages. Now, users can write one post in the style of their choosing, and it will be translated to appear in all their friend’s languages.
How does it work?
When a user is writing a status, there will be an option to have the text appear in additional languages. The writer needs only to click on a drop-down menu named something like “Language: Select” and choose the desired language. Then bada-bing, bada-boom, the text will be automatically translated.
Wait, that’s not all: once the author has selected the language, they have the choice of sharing the post in yet another language! They would just have to click on a button written in gray text, “Write post in another language,” found beneath the blue text for the language they specified. Then they would select the language they want and still be able to edit the post afterward, should they wish to do so.
This new feature gives users the opportunity to be able to write, publish and receive posts in their mother-tongue, while knowing their foreign friends can read it with ease. So far, there are 45 applicable languages included in the multilingual tool. Nevertheless, users still waiting for their style to update can learn foreign languages bit by bit from the comfort of their news feed.
Ah oui, Facebook. Un autre point pour vous!
Source: Tech Times