Reddit Is Using AI to Expand Translation Services

Redditors in 35 additional countries will soon be able to read and respond to posts and comments in the language of their choosing. Artificial intelligence will auto-translate posts and comments in either direction with a new feature that will roll out in the coming weeks, the social media forum announced Wednesday.

The company says the translation and localization feature, which it tested earlier this year in France, is now available in Spain and Brazil and soon will spread to Germany, Italy, the Philippines and countries in Latin America. It will work on mobile and desktop browsers as well as Reddit’s apps, allowing Redditors to click on a translate icon to convert their entire feed to a language they select.

Reddit said in a post announcing the feature that responses to posts and comments will be auto-translated back to the language of the original community where it was posted.

The company says “in the coming weeks” a banner will appear to inform users when a post has been translated and there’ll be an option to see posts and comments in their original language. Reddit says it’s also working on including translated content in search results.

Earlier this year, Reddit entered a $60 million deal with Google to allow that company’s AI models to train on user-generated content from Reddit. Statista estimates that Reddit will grow to about 53 million active US users per month by next year, up from 49 million as of the second quarter of 2024.