Bing’s translate feature has been getting some attention lately. First Yelp announces they will be using Bing translate. Then Twitter tries to stop translating their tweets without anyone noticing. A win and a loss? Only time will tell.
Yelp’s mobile apps will begin using Bing translate to translate reviews. Available in all 15 languages supported by Yelp, Bing will now help users post and read reviews around the globe. Yelp tells The Next Web, “Although machine-translation is not perfect, it’s a fantastic resource for understanding the overall meaning and context of a review that would otherwise be unavailable to a Yelp user who does not speak that language. Use this feature to get a general idea of a reviewer’s experience, but understand that some details may be lost in translation.”
Currently Yelp has only integrated Bing translate into their iOS app, and their Android app is soon to follow. Although, Yelp users will only be able to translate if they are using Yelp on a mobile device. No word if this feature is coming to the web version or not.
While it is a big win for Bing translate to be in Yelp, Twitter seems to have silently stopped their own Bing translate implementation. Users are noticing that the option for translating individual tweets seems to be missing from Twitter’s web client. No word from Twitter or Microsoft on why this feature has been removed. Twitter is known to experiment with features in their web client, so it is not a huge surprise to see this feature come and go.
It could be possible Twitter is just refining their implementation of tweet translation. Maybe Microsoft is making changes on their end to improve language auto-detect or location awareness. Until more information comes out no one can know for sure.
How have your experiences with Bing translate been? Are you excited to see Yelp translating their reviews? What about the tweet translate; will you miss it? Did you even know it was an option? Let us know below!