Facebook already offers brands the ability to market a Global Business Page, but not many people truly know what that even means. Let alone do they even have access to create one.
But much like what Google has been able to accomplish with Google Translate, Facebook has been working on crowdsourcing translation within their own ecosystem so that they can allow every user to engage with every piece of content.
Sounds ambitious.
But if any company can do it, Facebook would be atop that list.
The new status update feature allows a user to compose message in multiple languages. Clicking a button will apply machine translation with the added ability to take what was generated and add your own content in-language (if the user is bi-lingual, of course).
The video below overviews what the experience looks like.
It’s important to note that Facebook has already mentioned that this rollout is not going to be solely for business pages. Regular users will also have this button enabled.
This means that social communication of all kinds will be expanded so that any and everybody can understand the context posted on Facebook (with FB’s machine translation accuracy being the delta in the equation).
It will be interesting to see how Facebook scales this functionality. I’d expect to see this in WhatsApp and Messenger soon. As for virtual reality, we’ll find out if they can figure out a way to capture voice recognition and apply the same types of machine translation automatically to it.
The sky is truly the limit for Facebook’s rapid innovation.