The feature is based on Bing Translate, but relies more on user translations

Oct 7, 2011 12:10 GMT  ·  By

Facebook has long relied on the 'kindness of strangers' for translations, or, put another way, it crowdsourced the translation much of the site's content in most of the languages that's available in.

Facebook, like Twitter which is doing the same, can rely on the size of its audience to find people willing to translate the site for free. But now, it's making it even easier to for Pages to get the same benefit of crowd translation.

For pages that have enabled all types of translations, users will now see a Translate link next to public posts, for those written in other languages than their own, but also next to individual comments.

"We launched a new translation tool that enables people to translate posts directly inline on Facebook Pages through Bing Translate," Facebook's Vadim Lavrusik announced on Facebook itself, perhaps inspired by the way Google+ reveals most of its updates and changes.

"With this service, it will be even easier for people to enjoy public Page content on Facebook regardless of the languages that they know. If a comment is posted in another language, you'll see a 'translate' button," he added.

Facebook relies on Bing Translate for the feature, the strong tie to Microsoft showing its benefits again. At first, the machine translation tools are used to provide a translation of the post in whatever language the user prefers.

But users can also provide their own, presumably, improved translations for the posts. If their translation is better and is voted by other users, it will replace the Bing-provided version.

Just to make sure, the translation feature only works on Facebook Pages, belonging to companies, organizations, public persons and so on, not on individual profiles.

What's more, as noted, it only works if Page administrators have enabled it. To do this, go to "Your Settings" and select "Allow translations from Admin, community and machine translators."