Reddit brings AI-powered, automatic translation to many new countries

Reddit is bringing machine learning-powered translation to more than 35 new locations in Europe, Asia and Latin America in a move designed to open up the English-focused social network to more users.

The service comes about five months after Reddit first introduced universal translation for French speakers, though the company had previously enabled users to translate individual posts into multiple languages. It also follows seven months after Reddit went public, and although the company said its user base and ad revenue continue to grow, the most obvious conduit to attract a larger base is to make its content available in multiple languages.

A big selling point of Reddit’s new translation feature is that users can set both posts and associated comments to automatically translate from the community’s original language to the user’s language according to their Reddit settings. This means that a conversation can flow in a particular subreddit between two different languages, and users won’t have to manually translate every reply. You can post in any language you want, and as long as Reddit supports it, it will be automatically translated into the community’s pre-set language.

To do this, users of supported regions will see a new translation icon in their menu that will allow them to view content in their preferred language.

Posts translated by Reddit will be labeled as such, and users will be able to choose to view the post in the original language if they wish.

Similar to what it did with the translation of posts in French earlier this year, Reddit said that the content will be indexed in supported languages ​​in search engines, which means that people Googling to find answers to questions in their language will see results from Reddit, too.

Reddit doesn’t specify 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 – albeit only in those countries.

Reddit added that it plans to expand AI-powered translation to Germany, Italy, the Philippines and markets across Latin America “in the coming weeks.”