Facebook Now Allows Inline Language Translations For Page Content And Comments

The language of a Facebook page depends on the language chosen by the page administrator or the person who created the Facebook page in question.Until now, there wasn’t any way to translate Facebook pages to a custom language of your choice. You have to read the page content on the default language chosen by the page creator and often times, this can be very irritating.

Let’s say you are a German citizen and have subscribed to updates from the Facebook page of Google. You want to read the posts in German but the content posted at the Facebook fan page is in English.  You can neither read and understand the content of the post, nor respond to all the comments or replies that have been posted in another language you can’t read.

Of course you can use Google Translate and other language translation websites to manually translate a post but why take that extra effort when Facebook has enabled language translation engine by default.

Facebook has recently partnered with Bing Translate and is now offering inline language translations for posts and comments on user fan pages. Using this service, users can easily enjoy public posts on any Facebook fan page, regardless of the language the content is posted in. If you are the creator or administrator of a Facebook page and want to provide users the ability to translate page content to their own languages, here are a few things you have to do:

1. Login to your facebook account and browse to the Facebook fan page you have created.

2. Click “use Facebook as page”

3. Go to “Your Settings” and choose “Allow translations from Admin, community and machine translators”

When a user whose account language is different from the language of the Facebook post, arrives at your Facebook fan page – he will see a “Translate” link as shown below:

Clicking the “Translate”  button on any post or comment will open a Bing translation pop up window. Users can either submit their own translations or use the Bing translation engine to translate the content of a post or comment to a language of their choice.

I tried this feature on the fan page of this blog and I was shown a “manage translations” box where I can submit a translation to the Microsoft Translation engine. Cool!

No Translation apps or browser plugins are required to use the translation feature of Facebook. It is however important to note that the translate link will appear only if

• The page administrator has enabled the Bing translation engine for the Facebook fan page.
• Your account language is different from the language of a post or comment you are currently reading on the Facebook page. For example: If your account language is Espanol and a post is published in Spanish, you will not see the “Translate” link under posts and comments. You will however see the translate link under posts that are written in any other language other than spanish.

Please note that this feature is enabled only for Pages right now, not for Facebook profiles or timelines.

Tip: Add inline language translation to your website using Google Translate Ajax API