 "Twitter enables translate feature for high-profile tweets originating from the Egyptian unrest")
Even while Twitter has been testing out the translate feature on its website in association with Bing Translate, the service has made the auto-translate feature available to help users access tweets of high-profile Egyptian users. This move comes even as the African country has been facing a massive political unrest.
Egypt is in the midst of ousting elected President Mohammed Morsi in a military coup and the micro-blogging website is seeing a surge of tweets from political players from within the country. To ensure the world has access to first-hand information about the unrest in the Middle-East, Twitter has activated the Bing Translate tool for some of the key Twitter users from Egypt.
Twitter translating tweets originating from high-profile Egyptian accounts
The tweets are understandably being sent out in Arabic, a language that most people around the world are not well-versed with. The Bing-powered translator will save users following the revolution’s story a lot of time. Instead of feeding in the tweet into a search engine, you can merely hit on the time-stamp of the tweet to view the translation in your preferred language.
“As part of our experiment with Tweet text translation, we’ve enabled translation for some of the most-followed accounts in Egypt, so people around the world can better understand and keep up with what’s happening there,” Twitter said in a statement.
Twitter had already started testing out the translator feature in select markets on the website this week, before the Egyptian unrest reached a peak. You need to simply click on a foreign language tweet to view the translation while using Twitter. The translation service for Egypt seems to be the first official acknowledgement of this feature by the micro-blogging website.
Twitter has also created a list of high-profile accounts that are currently being given the translate feature, which you can check out and follow.
(Cover image credit: Reuters)
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