Facebook has played an important role in lessening the geographical distance between people around the world. Now the world’s largest social network has launched its new “multilingual composer” that will let users compose a single post that will appear in multiple languages on Facebook. Other users will be able to see that post in their preferred language.
The new tool has been built by Facebook’s own developers.
“People use Facebook to share information and ideas in many different languages,” the company said in a post on its website.
“In fact, 50 per cent of our community speaks a language other than English and most people don’t speak each other’s languages, so we’re always thinking about ways we can help remove language as a barrier to connecting on Facebook.”
The “multilingual composer” lets users write a post in one language and then select languages in which user would like the post to be published. For example, if a post is written in English, it can also be published in Spanish for other users who would see Spanish translation of that post.
Facebook currently translates 45 languages and the new composer will work with all these languages.
Facebook started testing the new feature earlier this year with owners of business pages. The composer was tried with about 5,000 pages, receiving 70 million daily views. Of these, 25 million views are seen in secondary language. Now the social network has started a user test. The composer is currently available only for desktops, although users can view the multilingual posts across all platforms.
The new tool will also help Facebook collect valuable data to help translation software convert slang one language to another.
“This will not only help people communicate better across diverse groups that speak many languages, but will help train and improve our machine translation models as we gather new data in less common languages — moving us closer to the vision of removing language barriers across Facebook,” the company said.
Fazil Ayan, who leads work on Facebook’s translation software, said: “The multilingual-post option that rolled out today was inspired by the fact that many people already write posts in multiple languages. But they had to either write multiple versions of a message in one post or create separate posts-strategies that tend to reduce the chance anyone would respond.”
About Facebook
Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, U.S., is the largest social networking website in the world. The Facebook website was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students Andrew McCollum, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz. Initially, the websites membership was limited to Harvard students, but it was later expanded to include higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University. Since 2006, anyone aged 13 or above can register on the website.
By late 2007, there were 100,000 business pages on Facebook. These pages were created by companies to promote themselves and attract customers. On October 24, 2007, Microsoft revealed to have purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million. Once year later, Facebook announced its plan to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
In July 2010, the company announced to have touched the milestone of 500 million users, making it the world’s largest online social network at the time. At that time, almost half of the Facebook users were using the site daily, for an average of 34 minutes (according to the company’s data).
According to SecondMarket Inc., Facebook’s value in November 2010 was $41 billion, making it the third largest American web company after Google and Amazon.
The initial public offering of Facebook was held in February 2012. Three months later, the company started selling stock to the public, and reached an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. As of March 31, 2016, the social network had over 1.65 billion monthly active users, and it is now also the world’s most popular social networking site based on the number of active user accounts.
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