Some Twitter users in Brazil may be seeing a timeline that’s purely in Brazilian Portuguese even if they’re following accounts that usually tweet in other languages. That’s because Twitter has started testing automatic translations in the region “to make it easier to understand the conversations [they] follow.” In a blog post by Twitter Brazil, the company said the feature will be on by default for a limited number of users on both iOS and Android. While Twitter already has a translation feature, users still have to click or tap a tweet to activate it.
Twitter divided the testers in two different groups likely in an effort to see which format would be better received. One group will see all tweets in their preferred language, and similar to Facebook’s automatic translations, participants have to click on a tweet to see it in its original form. The other group will see both the original and the translated text in one tweet. Both groups will know they’re looking at translations, though, because tweets will be marked with “Translated from [language] by Google” or “Translated from [language] by Microsoft.”