How Facebook’s new translation software will translate slang
Facebook is one of the most popular and most recognisable social media platforms in the world today with over one billion people from all corners of the world logging onto the social media platform on a daily basis. So it only makes complete sense now that Facebook has decided to integrated their very own automatic translation software to translate posts from one user to another, a move which has seen the need for professional translation agencies and their translation services diminished, well on Facebook at least.
The new automatic translation software is able to help Facebook users all around the world post profile updates and posts in multiple languages at the same time. This would make the post at the very least readable in another language depending on your language settings and location. For example if you are based in the UK and your Facebook settings are set to English and you were to update your Facebook status saying [with the typical mundane drivel associated with Facebook updates] something like “I like pizza” or “on the toilet” in English, when your Italian friend from Rome, Italy logs on to his account, he would read your toilet based update in an Italian translation as his language account settings would most likely be set to his native Italian.
The software is also developed to ‘learn’ more with the data that Facebook receives from these translations and Facebook are hoping for the translation software to become better and more accurate as time progresses, they even hope to translate slang and other informal speech from language to language. For example a post wishing someone a happy birthday where most people are too lazy to actually write that and often opt for the easy ‘HBD’, Facebook’s software actually recognises that this means ‘happy birthday’ and translates accordingly which in comparison to Google translate which leaves that as is makes the Facebook software pretty impressive.
The leader of this initiative Fazil Ayan states that the software was ‘inspired’ by users that already have written multilingual updates but had no option other than to write the same status multiple times in their desired languages. Now you can create your post choose for Facebook to generate into multiple languages including Spanish, French, German translation etc.
University of Ottawa professor, Diana Inkpen and Stanford University professor, Christopher Manning both agree that Facebook’s translation software offers a ‘unique’ chance to develop slang translation software as opposed to the usual formal translations software out there. Manning acknowledges that although user data is not going to be 100% accurate it is the best chance to learn how to translate slang from language to language.
Of course this will never be a substitute for old fashioned human translations and localisation services but it has to be said it is an impressive idea and something that could see Facebook bring people from various different countries speaking different languages and dialects even closer than before.
What are your thoughts?
