Reddit is bringing machine learning-powered translations to more than 35 new locales in Europe, Asia, and Latin America in a move designed to open the largely English-centric social network to more users.
The service comes nearly five months after Reddit first introduced site-wide translation for French speakers, though the company had previously enabled users to translate individual posts across several languages. Reddit already allows users to stipulate their preferred content language for post recommendations, as well as set their display language, which translates the Reddit interface itself.
Today’s announcement follows seven months after Reddit went public, and although the company has said its user base and ad revenue continue to grow, the most obvious conduit for attracting a larger base is to make all its content available in more languages.
The big selling point of Reddit’s new translation feature is that users can configure both posts and the corresponding comments to auto-translate from a community’s original language to the user’s own language according to their Reddit settings. This means that a conversation can flow in a given subreddit between two different languages, and users won’t have to manually translate every response. You can post in whatever language you want, and as long as Reddit supports it, it will automatically be translated into the community’s pre-set language.
To do this, users in supported locales will see a new translate icon in their menu that will let them view content in their preferred language.
Posts that have been translated by Reddit will be labeled as such, and users will be able to choose to view posts in the original language if they wish.
Similar to what it did with translating posts in French earlier this year, Reddit said that the content will be indexed in the supported languages for search engines, meaning people Googling for answers to questions in their own tongue will see results from Reddit, too.
Reddit doesn’t outline all the new languages it will support, but the translation service is already available in Brazil and Spain as of today, so one can assume that Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish are now supported — though presumably only in those countries.
Reddit added that it plans to expand AI-powered translations to Germany, Italy, the Philippines, and markets across Latin America “in the coming weeks.”
