Building a better way to write posts in multiple languages

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Shawn Mei
8 min readbeginner
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Overview

The article discusses Facebook's development of a multilingual composer that allows users to create posts in multiple languages, enhancing communication across diverse audiences. It details the challenges faced in implementation, including storage solutions and user experience considerations.

What You'll Learn

1

How to create multilingual posts using Facebook's new composer

2

Why machine translation can enhance user engagement in social media

3

When to use author translations versus concatenation for multilingual content

Prerequisites & Requirements

  • Understanding of multilingual content management
  • Familiarity with Facebook's platform features(optional)

Key Questions Answered

How does the multilingual composer improve post visibility for diverse audiences?
The multilingual composer allows authors to create a single post in multiple languages, ensuring that viewers see the content in their preferred language. This reduces the need for multiple posts and enhances engagement by making it easier for users to interact with content in their language.
What are the two approaches considered for storing multilingual posts?
The two approaches were concatenation, where all language messages are stored together, and author translation, where the original message is stored alongside separate translations. The latter was chosen for its simplicity in editing and management, allowing authors to edit all versions simultaneously.
What signals are used to determine which language version of a post to display?
The system uses several signals, including the viewer's language preferences, locale settings, and the language they most commonly post in. If no match is found, the default is to show the author's first message, with an option to see translations.
How does Facebook ensure a consistent viewing experience across platforms for multilingual posts?
Facebook selects the best message to display to viewers on the server when loading the feed, which allows for a consistent experience across different platforms without requiring changes to native mobile applications.

Key Statistics & Figures

Daily posts made using the multilingual composer
10,000
Approximately 5,000 Pages are using the composer to post daily.
Daily views of multilingual posts
70 million
These views include 25 million in one of the post's secondary languages.

Technologies & Tools

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Key Actionable Insights

1
Utilize the multilingual composer to streamline communication across diverse audiences on Facebook.
This tool allows for a single post to be created in multiple languages, reducing the effort needed to manage separate posts for different language speakers.
2
Leverage machine translation features to enhance post creation efficiency.
By using machine translations as a starting point, authors can save time and improve the accuracy of their multilingual posts, making it easier to reach a broader audience.
3
Consider the author translation approach for managing multilingual content.
This method simplifies the editing process and ensures that all language versions of a post can be updated simultaneously, improving content management efficiency.

Common Pitfalls

1
Assuming that post content can only contain a single language.
This assumption can lead to complications in managing multilingual posts, as it requires significant changes to the underlying storage and retrieval logic.

Related Concepts

Multilingual Content Management
Machine Translation Systems
User Engagement Strategies