Twitter announced today it is bringing back project it terminated in 2013, which is the ability for users to view tweets in multiple languages. Now the company is teaming up with Bing and its translation engine to make translated tweets a reality once again.
You can manually enable the translations by logging in to your account on a desktop or laptop computer, going to your account settings, and changing your tweet translation setting by checking the box next to ‘Show Tweet translations’.
Once tweet translations are enabled you can view a tweet translation by looking for the globe icon located in the tweet and tapping on it to expand it. A translation of the text in the tweet will then appear below the original Tweet.
The company admits that the service is far from perfect and still needs to be worked on:
“… the results still vary and often fall below the accuracy and fluency of translations provided by a professional translator.”
While the service no doubt leaves something to be desired, it’s still an improvement over the zero built-in options we had before.
Bing’s translation engine works with more than 40 language pairs, and is currently available on Twitter.com, Twitter for iOS and Android, and TweetDeck.
