Twitter Translates With Bing, Gives Instagram The Cold Shoulder

Twitter users will now be able to use translation services courtesy of Microsoft Bing’s translation tool.

A globe will appear on screen when foreign languages are detected on a user’s Twitter feed, a clicking that globe will translate the Tweets.

Twitter can translate 40 languages

To use the feature, users have to go to their account settings and enable translation. Currently, Twitter can translate 40 language pairs.

However, the Bing-powered tool is not yet totally reliable. The company said that translations “still vary and often fall below the accuracy and fluency of translations provided by a professional translator”.

Alongside the news, it has also emerged that Twitter is recommending that its users stop posting photos on their profiles that come from photo-bases social network Instagram.

Verified ‘blue tick’ users, such as celebrities, brands, and journalists, have received an in-app notification from Twitter when posting a photo from Instagram. The notification says: “Post your photos directly on Twitter to make sure your fans always see them.”

The firm stopped displaying Instagram photos in-feed in December 2012, and this move is further proof of Twitter competitive streak with a fellow social network. In December 2014, Instagram announced it had garnered 300 million active users, compared to Twitter’s 284 million.

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