With over 750 million accounts, Facebook users span nearly every country in the world. This large population can cause communication problems because of the number of different languages everyone speaks. Now, according to Inside Facebook, the social media site has started to roll out a translation feature to help bridge the communication gap between users.
The new “Translate” button sits next to the “Like” button and apparently does a good job of translating not only standard words but also slang phrases. The given example shows a translation of the phrase, “Totally cool” from Hebrew to English. After the post has been translated, the button changes to “Original” so users can see the exact text that was originally entered.
The translation functionality could be especially useful for multinational organizations that receive comments that are in different languages. Currently many people cut and paste the comments into Google’s translation tool, so the embedded feature would be a timesaver. Facebook’s translation currently supports Spanish, French, Hebrew, Chinese, and English.
The feature is currently only available on Facebook Pages and not on profiles or apps, but if it works as planned we can expect to see it rolled out for the entire site in the near future. We wonder when a bad translation will lead to another world-wide Internet meme: Move Zig!
Image Courtesy of Inside Facebook