Twitter has quietly stopped offering users the ability to instantly translate tweets using Bing’s machine translation feature, slightly more than a year after the company started using Microsoft’s technology. Users began noticing the feature’s absence earlier this week, though Twitter hasn’t said exactly when it stopped offering the service, or why. But one thing is clear: people who want to get tweets translated from a foreign language will have to copy and paste them into a translation service of choice, rather than clicking a button on Twitter’s website.
The Bing translation feature in Twitter that quietly made an appearance two months ago has suddenly gone away, according to many users. The feature, which showed up earlier this year, allowed Twitter users to quickly translate posts that were in another language. At the time, it was viewed as surprising that Twitter used Microsoft’s translation tools, rather than Google’s. According to The Next Web, which collected a series of tweets over the last few days, Twitter quietly killed the feature sometime this week. It’s not clear, however, whether the feature is just on hiatus and could come back in the future. That Twitter added any translation offering to its service was important. The US-based company is seeing most of its growth come internationally, and users are now seeing tweets in different languages more frequently. Being able to quickly translate those tweets and see what’s being said has been an important addition for some users. As Twitter has noted on several occasions, it often tries out new features. From time to time, those experiments become permanent features, while in others, they are nixed. It appears at this juncture that the translation feature has joined the second group.