Facebook Messenger will now translate your messages in English and Spanish

Facebook introduces a new M Translation feature to its platform that will automatically translate the messages between English and Spanish. According to CNET, the feature will be rolled out for America and Mexico first and initially it will support to translate messages in two languages – English and Spanish. However, Facebook says that, in future, it plans to add other languages and countries as well.

How does it work?

Using this feature is rather simple. When users, whose default language on Messenger is English, receives a message in Spanish, they will automatically receive a popup asking if they want messages from that person to be translated to English? If the user selects yes, all future messages will be auto-translated in that English. The feature will also work the other way round for users with Spanish as their default language, but receiving messages in English. The users will receive both the translated message and the original one, in order to avoid any kind of confusion.

The feature was launched at F8 Developers Conference, earlier this year in April. Initially, it was made available only for Facebook Marketplace. It is only now that Facebook has decided to extend the feature to Messenger which clearly shows that the company is contented with its initial roll out.

For now, the users who want to translate messages to their default language have to first do the copy and pasting to a translation app, or use a service such as Google Translate’s Tap To Translate. Tap to Translate makes it easy and quick to translate text but perhaps not quite as easy as having Messenger do everything automatically for you.