Twitter adds translation tool

Twitter will now give translations for tweets, using Bing’s computer translation tool, The Independent reported.

Users will be able to click on the small globe icon in foreign language tweets to have them translated, with the new version appearing below the original tweet.

The feature must be enabled in account settings. After that, it will be available for all users on twitter.com and TweetDeck, as well as Twitter’s official clients for iOS and Android.

The tool can translate over 40 language pairs, Twitter said.

The translation tool uses Bing’s software to provide the translations. Twitter warned that the translations “still vary and often fall below the accuracy and fluency of translations provided by a professional translator”, and said that it would continue to show the original tweet to help in case of problems with the wording.