There is not a day goes by without a surprise by Facebook. First timelines and a bunch of new applications and then completely new profiles… In the meantime, I have discovered the translation tool of Facebook. According to an article on mashables.com: “This is different from Google’s translation tool — this opt-in service is powered by Microsoft Bing and works on individual posts on Facebook Pages, including comments. For example, if you’re an English speaker reading aFacebook public Page and encounter a comment in Spanish, you’ll see a Translate button next to it, letting you click to see it translated into a pop-out window in English.” However, it is not active for all the comments or wall posts somehow.
I tried this app in couple of Facebook pages. It, again, turned out to be useless. This app may be useful only for certain language pairs, which are similar to each other. When it comes to gramatically different languages like Turkish, it fails.
I do not know it will improve itself or not, machine translation still scares me to death!
Posted by Andrzej Pietrzak on October 10, 2011 at 13:18
You are fortunate if you are only scared of machine translation. I always invoke the assistance of supernatural forces before switching on my computer and for the completion of any operation on the computer.
Posted by Aim Danışmanlık on October 11, 2011 at 12:45
I like it 🙂 I just try not to think about other scary stuff
Posted by Sarai on July 5, 2012 at 13:47
I think the problem with this sort of machine translation is that it is not really solving a problem… Facebook in particular is where people connect along lines of similarity, and language is one of those lines. Most people who use Facebook tend to communicate with people in one or two languages – people who are actually interested in languages will learn the actual languages. It is frustrating that people get the impression that these tools are easy without actually having used them.