Twitter will now let you translate tweets with Bing

The internet is a global network, and if it wasn’t for built-in widgets that translated foreign languages many of us would be stuck. Twitter is the latest website to offer this, and now users can choose to translate tweets at the click of a button.

Translations, like Facebook, will be provided by Bing, and gives users an extra button that will translate tweets that are not written in their preferred language. That means no more copying tweets into a third-party translation site to understand what’s being said.

Translations aren’t done automatically, but if you’d rather you didn’t have the option available you can disable it. Just head to Settings > Account > Tweet Translation and untick the box. In theory that should work, but in practice I found the box was magically ticked again after I’d hit ‘save changes’.

Unlike translations on other websites, Twitter’s system doesn’t replace the original text. Instead the translation is provided underneath. Apparently the reason for this is in case the automatic translation sometimes has errors, though how many of those are down to literal translations is unclear.

Tweet translation is available right now for people who use Twitter via a browser, TweetDeck, or the official iOS and Android apps.