Meta brings built-in language translation feature to WhatsApp

Initially, the iOS WhatsApp version will support 22 International languages worldwide.

With more than three billion active users, WhatsApp is the most popular messenger app in the world. However, it faces stiff competition from rivals such as Telegram, Signal and others.

To keep subscribers hooked to WhatsApp, Meta regularly introduces new features to improve the user experience. Recently, it introduced generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI)-powered feature to help user draft error-free messages.

In the latest instance, the company has introduced built-in language translation in the WhatsApp. 

This new feature works for one-to-one individual chats, even group chats and Channel updates as well.

This will come in handy when communicating with international friends and colleagues. And, when tourists go to trips and use WhatsApp to communicate with local travel agents.

WhatsApp now supports more than 20 international languages.

Here’s how the new language translation works on WhatsApp:

When you receive a message with different language on the WhatsApp chat, you can just long-press and tap ‘Translate’. 

Then, choose the language you want the message to be translated from or to, and download it to be saved for future translations. 

WhatsApp noted that Android users will be able to choose to turn on automatic translation for an entire chat thread, so that all future incoming messages in that conversation are translated as well. Similar feature will be introduced for iOS versions soon.

Initially, for Android version will support six languages including English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic.

And, iOS WhatsApp will support 22 language including Arabic, Dutch, English (United Kingdom), English (United States), French (France), German (Germany), Hindi, Indonesian, Italian (Italy), Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese (China mainland), Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Spain), Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.