How Meta AI translations work: reach a wider audience translating your reels into other languages

Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, has officially announced that the simultaneous translation feature powered by Meta AI will begin rolling out to all public professional accounts (with more than 1,000 followers) this week. For now, it will only translate from English to Spanish and vice versa.

This new feature, called “Meta AI Translations”, has already been operational for several months in select accounts in the United States, and in recent weeks, we ourselves have noticed it on our Instagram account (which we strongly recommend following in order to be the first to learn about these updates).

What is Meta AI Translations

From now on, content creators seeking to reach new audiences will be able to overcome the language barrier with “Meta AI Translations”, provided the feature is enabled for their account.

The requirements for translating your reels into other languages are currently as follows:

• Have a public account with more than 1,000 followers.
• Maintain a professional account.
• Meta AI must be available in your region. This excludes the European Union, United Kingdom, South Korea, Brazil, Australia, Turkey, South Africa, Nigeria, Texas, or Illinois.

However, even if you are unable to translate your own reels, you may still listen to those of other users in your preferred language. For instance, when viewing any of Mosseri’s latest videos speaking directly to the camera, you will be able to hear him speaking in Spanish.

In other words, provided the feature is activated, the AI will use the creator’s voice tone as a reference and then…will work its magic.

Moreover, as remarkable as this is, there is an additional feature: if you pay attention to the speaker’s lip movements—in this case, Mosseri—you will see that he articulates in Spanish (albeit imperfectly, but he does).

 

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A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

And to think, Mosseri is more of a New Yorker than the cast of Friends.

With this, Meta aims to ensure that content creators reach new audiences.

How to translate your reels into other languages to increase reach

1. Create a reel.
2. Before publishing, click on “Translate your voice with Meta AI”.
3. Next to it, you will see a button to activate this feature. Here you can also enable or disable the lip sync option. If you select “Review before publishing”, you will be able to preview how your translated video will appear.
   
4. Click on “Select languages” to choose the languages into which you wish to translate your reel.
5. Then, add a description and cover image to your reel and publish it. Your reel will appear with a label indicating that it was translated with Meta AI.

In addition, Meta will introduce a new metric in both Facebook and Instagram that will allow you to view statistics of your videos by language. This way, you can identify which content performs better in a given language and develop a strategy tailored to your social media profile.

How to Watch Reels in Other Languages

If you wish Instagram to translate reels into Spanish for you, there are two options:

• Navigate to Settings and select “Language and Translations.” A drop-down menu will appear with various options for setting content to translate automatically into several languages, including Spanish. Furthermore, ensure the “Translate voice” feature is enabled. You may also opt for transcriptions of the audio in the chosen default language.

• The other option is to select the translation directly on the reel. To do this, while watching the video, click the three dots located in the upper right corner of the video, then select “Translate post” and choose the language you prefer as the default.

If you do not like this option, you may disable it. Simply go to your settings, navigate to “Language and Translations,” and disable the feature.

If this feature has not yet appeared for you, rest assured that it will be gradually rolled out to all accounts, as has occurred with previous updates.

For now, we have attempted to listen to Mosseri’s voice in Hindi, Japanese, and Italian, but… it has not worked. At this time, translations are only available from English to Spanish and from Spanish to English.

This is not the only new feature that Instagram has released. In the same video, Mosseri announces several more updates, which we detail in this article.

Photo: Instagram