Reddit Expands AI Translation to New Countries

More than 35 new places in Europe, Asia, and Latin America will soon have machine learning-powered versions added to Reddit

This is an effort to bring more people to the primarily English-speaking social network.

It has been almost five months since Reddit first made the site translatable for French speakers. Before this, the company let users translate specific posts into multiple languages. It also comes seven months after Reddit went public. The company has said that its user base and ad revenue are still growing, but the most apparent way to get more people to use it is to make its content available in more languages.

One of the best things about Reddit’s new translation tool is that users can set it up so that both posts and comments automatically translate from the original language of a community to the user’s language. In this case, two languages can be used in the same subreddit simultaneously, and users won’t have to translate each answer by hand. You can post in any language, and as long as Reddit accepts it, it will be translated into the language the community has chosen.

So that this can happen, users in supported locales will see a new “translate” icon in their menu. This will let them see information in the language they want.

Users can see posts in the original language if they want to, but posts that Reddit has translated will be marked as such.

Reddit said that the content will be indexed in the approved languages for search engines, just like it did earlier this year when it translated posts in French. This means that people searching for answers to questions in their own language will also find Reddit results.

Unfortunately, Reddit doesn’t list all the new languages it will support. However, the translation service is already live in Brazil and Spain, so it’s safe to assume that Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish are now supported, though probably only in those two countries.

The company also said that it would be adding AI-powered translators to markets in Germany, Italy, the Philippines, and Latin American countries “in the coming weeks.”