Twitter is finally
making it easier for its 284 million active users to read tweets in
any language by building Bing Translator into the social
network.
Twitter users will be able to choose whether or not they want to
see translation options for tweets in their account setting. If
they choose to enable this setting, a globe symbol will appear by
tweets in other languages and clicking it will cause the
translation to appear below the original tweet. Translation options
will be available across twitter.com, Twitter for iOS and Android,
as well as TweetDeck.
Bing will be able to provide machine translations of tweets
between more than 40 pairs of languages, but that doesn't
necessarily mean they'll all be of the same quality. Twitter has
been hasty to explain why some translations may seem a bit off.
"Although Bing Translator relies on advanced translation software
to provide Tweet translations, the results still vary and often
fall below the accuracy and fluency of translations provided by a
professional translator," says Twitter in its Help Centre.
Twitter supports more than 35 languages, but until now groups
have been fairly polarised -- able only to follow action unfolding
in their own languages. This is a huge shame given that Twitter has
been at the centre of major world events -- the Arab Spring, for
example -- in recent years. A translate feature would have opened
up conversations that were happening between people on the ground
to all Twitter users, providing better insight into and
understanding of events, regardless of where they were located.
Don't
miss
Twitter boasts that 77 percent of its users are based outside of
the US, and while this obviously doesn't reflect the number of
users who have English as their native language, it does show the
importance of enabling users to be able to conduct conversations
across continents.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-01/23/twitter-bing-translate http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/s_v/twitter_8_1.jpg
Twitter hatches Bing-translated tweets
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