Los Angeles — In an attempt to brand itself entirely international, popular social media hub Facebook is apparently experimenting with a new real-time translate feature that will automatically convert different languages into the member’s current language at the press of a button — and amazingly that is 750 million users around the world who are going to have an easier time talking to each other.
So far it is still unclear just how the service is being tested or rolled out across the site, but according to Inside Facebook’s Eric Eldon reports that some users are now noticing a “Translate” button appear next to the number of likes listed on users’ comments.
Also, the button only seems to appear on comments written in a language different than a user’s default selection: e.g. “Translate” will pop up for comments written in French if your language options are set to English, when a user clicks on the Translate button–which only seems to be working for a select number of languages at the moment, including Spanish, French, Chinese, and Hebrew–the original text of a comment is replaced with Facebook’s translated attempt.
Further, the Translate button is then replaced by “Original,” hence, reverting back to the original comment text is as easy as clicking on the “original” button.
Because Facebook’s humongous 750 million user-base spans a large number of countries and languages, there is a huge need for translation features in order to better to fulfill its mission to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Also, most users reluctant and are not currently communicating much with people who speak other languages, simply because they can not understand each other. This is especially true for Page owners that have internationally icons bringing in comments from languages that Facebook supports.
However, the translation feature does not work for all comments. If Facebook is unable to properly analyze the language of the comment, it will return an error message: “There is no translation available for this story at the moment.” And translating text seems to be constrained to Facebook pages at the moment: There is no mass-translate option that will update a foreign user’s profile to one’s native language, or even comments left in a different language on one’s own Facebook wall.
Moreover, there is no indication of how this feature might work for those who have adopted some of Facebook’s more mysterious language options, like “Pirate” or “Upside Down.”
Facebook has already coupled with millions of people across the planet by translating its website into dozens of different languages, but in order to communicate with people that speak foreign languages, one must go to a third party website like Google Translate.
Besides, if Facebook rolls out this aspect to personal profiles and apps as well, one can also imagine some other engrossing ways it would be used. The most pressing need for translation seems to be with Pages because owners can not understand what fans are saying, so Facebook is focusing on solving this problem first with its beta testing of the translate button.
For instance, immigrant families who speak more than one language often have generational communication gaps, typically where older members speak the language of the home country while younger generations speak the language of the host country.
Nevertheless, the move now empowers social media giant Facebook users just that much more access to the global community. No longer will users have to copy and paste text into the third-party translate tool of their choice just to figure out what their friends are saying across the site.