Twitter Pulls Back From Experiment With Bing Translator

Less than two months after quietly expanding in-feed language translation, Twitter has removed the Bing Translator feature from its web and mobile apps.

The feature provided a quick and rough interpretation of tweets in foreign languages and was especially handy during international crises and global events like the FIFA World Cup. Judging from tweets in the week since the feature was dumped, many Twitter users are missing it.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment about the change; the company also never commented publicly about the expansion of the feature in June. But given Twitter’s ambition to be the “global town square,” it seems likely that the pullback from translation is only temporary.

Meanwhile, users will have to translate the old-school way, by copy-pasting text from tweets into their favorite online interpreter, something that one user already is trying with more satisfying results:

So since bing translate is not showing up in Twitter anymore I have been copying and pasting to Google translate. My god it's better! 😀🙌✒

— 🅃🄴🅁🄴🅂🄰 🄿🄾🅃🅃🅂 (@teresampotts) August 8, 2014