Twitter has well over 300 million users around the world, and they don’t all speak the same language. Soon you may not even notice as the micro-blogging platform is experimenting with automatically translating tweets in your stream.
Translation is already a feature of Twitter, but it’s not automatic. Tweets are presented in the language they were written in, but a “Translate Tweet” option appears below the text if you are logged in to your account. Tapping it carries out the translation immediately. However, as 9To5Mac reports, Twitter is testing automatic translation among a small group of users spread across iOS and Android in Brazil.
In a translated blog post, Twitter explained how the test will work, “When accessing the home page, a group of people will start to see all Tweets written in different languages translated into Portuguese. One part of the group will see the translated text and can click to return it to the original language, while the other part will view the translation and the original text in the same Tweet in a standard way. If a Tweet is translated, it will have the warning “Translated from English by Google” or “Translated from English by Microsoft”.”
Automatic translation is great for quickly scanning tweets in your first language, but it assumes those translations are accurate. If they aren’t it could cause confusion and upset, but it may also upset users who want to parse the second language for themselves. Hopefully if Twitter does make automatic translations a default feature, it’s one you can opt-out of in settings. However, for the most part I suspect users will appreciate the option.
