Facebook is set to start testing out a new feature that lets you easily share updates with all your friends and followers, even if they don’t speak the same language. It’s rolling the update out to some individual user accounts today after introducing it for Pages earlier this year.
If you happen to be in the beta test, you can use it by starting to enter a status update like normal and then clicking on the “Write post in another language” option. You’ll see a list of supported languages and Facebook will automatically translate your message into each one you pick. You can also edit the translations or re-write them entirely if you prefer.
Once you hit send, Facebook will automatically show each person the correct version of the post based on their preferred language. The social network makes that decision based on information included in their profiles along with the language they typically write in.
Facebook said it originally launched the new feature for Pages after the company noticed some businesses and groups were sharing the same message multiple times in different languages or simply including several translations in the same post. Facebook said it’s already a huge success, with 5,000 pages using the multilingual composer to send about 10,000 posts per day.
Bringing the same feature to Facebook’s massive user base of over a billion people won’t be easy. It could be a while before most of us get the update, but starting today you may want to keep an eye out for the new option.
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