Facebook is now a multilingual social media machine. The platform recently announced its new feature called “Multilingual Composer.” This feature was tested with Pages, those Facebook pages specifically for businesses and brands, earlier this year and now the platform is opening it up on for testing on some user accounts.
With the multilingual composer, a Facebook user can type in their desired post in their language and then have it translated to any of the 45 languages Facebook supports. From there, Facebook does all the work. Its software uses information such as the users preferred language settings, commonly used languages and location to determine which language the post should appear in.
Facebook noted, “With the multilingual composer, Page authors and people can compose a single post in multiple languages, and viewers who speak one of those languages will see the post only in their preferred language. This enables diverse audiences to more easily interact with the Pages and people they follow.”
The process is so easy: click type a post, click on the pull-down menu, add the languages you want and then click “post.”
With 50 percent of the Facebook community speaking a language other than English, the social media platform is trying to remove the language barrier by allowing people who don’t know other languages to speak one on Facebook.
What if your message doesn’t translate right? You will be able to edit the translated text if Facebook’s translation happens to be wrong. There is also the option to keep it in one language.
Facebook is also providing its users a helpful hand when it comes to creating a multilingual post. Their announcement stated, “To help authors create multilingual posts, we’re testing a pre-fill feature that takes the first message composed and uses machine translation to pre-fill the messages in the additional languages selected. Authors can use the translations as a starting point for their own translations in other languages, or use the provided version as is. These machine translations are generated by machine learning models based on hundreds of thousands of translations from one language to the other. This is the same system that generates translations in other places on Facebook, like when you click “See Translation” for posts and comments.”
The multilingual composer is only available to a test group right now. If you’re part of the multilingual composer test group, go to account settings, then under the Language section enable the Multilingual Posts option.
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