A photograph may certainly be worth a million words, but 500M active monthly users of Instagram still prefer adding comments and descriptions to pictures posted on the colorful social network. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrated 500M Instagram users on Tuesday. He posted a cute picture of himself overwhelmed with his subsidiary’s huge achievement. In the picture, he was seen enjoying the ‘500M Instagram users’ moment featured the CEO posing inside the Instagram frame. In order to mark the update on the occasion of reaching 500M users, Instagram adds translation button.
Screenshot: Instagram
Image Credit: Instagram Official
The Facebook-owned app reported 100M active monthly users since September 2015. Over 80 percent of Instagram users live outside the US. 300M individuals use the Instagram app every day as they flick through various photographs and curate colorful pictures of their own.
Instagram adds translation button to make the experience more delightful for users. Whether you’re describing how summer in Spain is, how mouthwatering your breakfast was, or how amazing the beach feels, there lays a fact that not every Instagram user around the globe will understand your language. You could be Spanish or Chinese writing in your native language, which other users might not be able to read. Also, how about captions on the photographs of other people in various languages that you do not understand?
It’s awful, isn’t it? This is why Instagram adds translation feature inside the text to make bios, comments, and captions readable no matter in which language they are. It’s a strong move taken by Instagram in sheer hopes to bring the social platform’s rapidly growing community close together.
The Facebook-owned company posted a message on Wednesday, which reads that button will be available in the app in the upcoming month. It will be visible on posts where the language of the on-screen text is entirely different to user’s own language.
“The Instagram community has grown faster and become more global than we ever imagined,” the message said. “And we’re excited that you’ll soon be able to understand the full story of a moment, no matter what language you speak.”
At present, the photo sharing giant supports over 20 languages, but if you come across captions or bio written in a different language there’s no translation button visible. This means the service doesn’t support the translation button yet. Also, for older comments and posts translations may not be visible at all.
The addition of the translation option will push Instagram to match the pace with other social networking giants like Twitter or parent company- Facebook. Both of these companies have been featuring automatic machine translating options since a while now.
This week in an interview with Forbes, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said,
“500 million is a milestone that very few companies get to. This scale is not a badge on our uniform, but a signal of our ambition. If we can have a billion or a billion and a half on Instagram, we get closer to capturing every experience in the world … [and] it’s a whole new chapter.”