Elon Musk says Twitter will translate, recommend foreign language tweets

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that Twitter will translate and recommend tweets from countries like Japan

January 21, 2023 11:08 am | Updated 12:59 pm IST

File photo of Elon Musk and the Twitter logo

File photo of Elon Musk and the Twitter logo | Photo Credit: Reuters

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the social media platform will recommend translated versions of foreign-language tweets to its users, in a matter of months.

“There are epic tweets in other countries every day (Japan especially),” he tweeted in response to his announcement. Mr. Musk also confirmed that the tweets would be translated before being shared with users from other cultures.

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In late 2022, Mr. Musk was reported as saying that Twitter was “Japan-centric.” He claimed that the Asian country had a high number of daily active users in spite of its relatively smaller population.

At present, Twitter users are generally shown tweets in their preferred languages, but can use a manual translation option to read tweets in other languages.

Mr. Musk also announced a list of other Twitter updates such as pinned Lists, timeline consistency, adjusted bookmarking controls, community notes on Quote Tweets, and new features for Twitter Blue subscribers.

The news about translated tweets comes shortly after CNBC reported on Friday that Twitter’s full-time employee headcount was around 1,300, with less than 550 full-time engineers, based on internal records. Around 1,400 people are not working at Twitter, but are still being paid.

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