Facebook to introduce ‘Multilingual Composer’

I always wanted to make Facebook posts in French, sometimes in German just to feel exotic but due to my limited lingual skills, it was just a dream but until now. And for those of you trying to be suave and converse with your international friends in their native tongues.

Facebook has started to test a new feature for its social network that allows users to create posts in multiple languages. And, no, you won’t just be spamming your friends with a series of translated posts that all say the same thing, just in different languages. When you go to write a status update, Facebook will instead fire up its new “multilingual composer,” assuming you’ve indicated you want to be able to post in multiple languages within Facebook’s settings.

A description on code.facebook.com reads, “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 trained on hundreds of thousands or millions 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 feature will let you edit the translated version hence giving you control over you posts in the different language. This feature will be available for all 45 languages the social network can currently translate. The company has rolled out the composer for all Page owners to use. It’s also now testing the feature with a small number of individual Facebook users. You can only use the composer on your desktop, but the translated text will appear on all platforms.