Twitter Testing Automatic Translation of Tweets in Brazil

Aug. 11, 2020

Right now, Twitter has a ‘Translate Tweet’ button to let users translate tweets from foreign languages to one they understand. The social media platform is nowtesting a new feature that automatically translates tweets.

“To make it easier to understand the conversations you follow on Twitter, we’re experiencing an automatic translation for Tweets in other languages that appear on your homepage. We know that sometimes it can take a long time to translate Tweet by Tweet into different languages and stay on top of what’s relevant to you,”wrote the company in a blog post.

Twitter is currentlytesting automatic translation with select users in Brazil. Tweets will get automatically translated to Portuguese for people part of the testing. Moreover, the company is limiting the test to its Android and iOS apps for now.

Users will see a “Translated from English by Google” or “Translated from English by Microsoft” badge below the tweet. This badge indicates that Twitter translated the original tweet from a different language. It is worth noting that users will have the option totap on the tweet to convert it back to its original language.

While Twitter must have implemented this feature to provide its users with a seamless experience, we must consider the fact that machine translations may go wrong in some cases. In addition, some users are hoping for an option to disable automatic translations on Twitter.

Naaaao, tomara que tenha uma opcão para desabilitar 😣

There’s no word if Twitter has plans to immediately expand the feature to other regions. The company says it may internationally expand the feature based on the performance of this test.

Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.