You can masquerade as multilingual on Facebook, as it translates your posts
Facebook is letting you post messages in different languages — even if you don’t know the language.
The social networking giant announced Friday it will allow people to create posts in multiple languages, which will then display to users in their native tongue.
If you create a post in English, for instance, you could choose to let Facebook translate it into another language, like Spanish. When it posts, English-speaking users will immediately see the post in English, while Spanish speakers will see the post in Spanish.
Facebook is introducing the feature to make all posts accessible to their vast numbers of global users.
Of Facebook’s 1.09 billion daily active users, 84.2% live outside the U.S. and Canada, and 50% of all users speak a language other than English.
Creators of public profiles to brands, celebrities and media companies have already been using this feature since February.
Software engineers Don Husa, Shawn Mei and Necip Fazil Ayan said authors create a post, then choose additional languages for translation of that message. Facebook then uses a pre-fill feature and machine-learning models trained on “hundreds of thousands or millions of translations.”
Facebook displays the multilingual post to a user’s native language by determining their location, language preferences and the language they most com- monly post in.
“We’re excited to see this tool help even more people on Facebook to connect with their friends who speak different languages,” Husa, Mei and Ayan said in a statemet.
The multilingual feature is part of a medley of changes Facebook announced last week. The social networking service also said it will increase posts from friends and family on News Feeds and allow users to create personal campaigns to raise money for non-profits.
Microsoft and Google, competitors to Facebook, had already stepped up their translation services.
Microsoft rolled out Skype Translator for Windows late last year, which translated conversations in real-time in six languages — English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin and Spanish.
Google Translate, meanwhile, allows Android users to translate text within any app merely by tapping on it.