These days, technology and social media are deeply ingrained into our daily lives. Yet somehow I feel that we still tend to think in quite small, local terms despite the potential for a global reach. The great news is that it will soon be a lot easier to accurately reach speakers of different languages.
Facebook developers are in the process of testing a new language feature that will allow page admins to publish posts in several different languages simultaneously.
Facebook’s automatic translation feature has already been available for some time, allowing users to receive updates and posts in their preferred language. However, as we know, machine translation is not accurate at the best of times, and cannot successfully translate slang, colloquialism or idioms.
Here you can see how to turn off the current automatic translation feature.
When creating a new post, this is where you might find the new language feature options when they are implemented.
With this new language feature, once you have your beautiful translations, crafted with care by real human translators, you will then be able to stack them up and add them to the same post. The version of your post that a reader sees will depend upon their language settings. Pretty neat, hey?
Actually, I think this feature is long overdue and will be a massive step forward for Facebook users around the world.
There is no news yet about when Facebook will complete testing, but as soon as we hear when the feature is due to be launched, we’ll be sure to let you know.
It’s pretty powerful stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. Where you go with it and what your message is, depends on you…
What other language features would you like to see from Facebook? What do you think about the use of AI in tranlsation?
