Reddit is bringing AI-powered, automatic translation to dozens of new countries

Reddit is bringing machine learning-powered translations to more than 35 new locales in Europe, Asia, and Latin America in a move designed to open the largely English-centric social network to more users.

The service comes nearly five months after Reddit first introduced site-wide translation for French speakers, though the company had previously enabled users to translate individual posts across several languages. Reddit already allows users to stipulate their preferred content language for post recommendations, as well as set their display language, which translates the Reddit interface itself.

Today’s announcement follows seven months after Reddit went public, and although the company has said its user base and ad revenue continue to grow, the most obvious conduit for attracting a larger base is to make all its content available in more languages.

The big selling point of Reddit’s new translation feature is that users can configure both posts and the corresponding comments to auto-translate from a community’s original language to the user’s own language according to their Reddit settings. This means that a conversation can flow in a given subreddit between two different languages, and users won’t have to manually translate every response. You can post in whatever language you want, and as long as Reddit supports it, it will automatically be translated into the community’s pre-set language.

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