Facebook to offer multilingual post options

With more than 1.6 billion people onboard globally, Facebook's new software will let users communicate with a global audience - even if you don't speak a language other than your own. On Friday, the company introduced new software that automatically translates Facebook posts to several different languages. Once you publish your post, Facebook will show it to people in their preferred languages.

Type up a post, click on a pull-down menu, and you can add up to 45 different language translations, ranging from French to Filipino to Lithuanian.

The software called the "multilingual composer," is currently being tested only among a small group of users. The company has already been testing it with Facebook Pages, which are specifically for businesses and brands, but it's now opening testing to the broader social network. The company said the feature is already being used by 5,000 Pages.

According to the social networking giant, half its users speak a language other than English. The new tool will use artificial intelligence to prefill the translation field when you add different languages to a post. Then the software uses information like a user's location, language preferences and what language a person most commonly uses to post on Facebook to decide which version of the message to show.

Software to overcome lingual barriers has been used by other tech companies as well including Google with its Translate app and Microsoft with its Skype Translator.

Facebook says that usually when people are trying to reach a mass audience, they type out the same message in several different languages and include them all in the same post. But that means readers have to scroll through a long post until they find the language they understand. With the new tool, a post author can also edit all the different language versions of the post simultaneously.