WhatsApp is rolling out a new feature that could make conversations with people around the world much easier. It will be especially useful for those with several international contacts. The company has announced that it is bringing built-in message translation to its WhatsApp app on both iOS and Android. This new tool allows you to quickly translate messages within your chats, eliminating the need to copy and paste text into a separate app.
To use the feature, all you have to do is long-press on a message and select the “Translate” option. From there, you can choose the language you want to translate to or from. Android users get an extra benefit: they can enable automatic translation for an entire chat. So, every incoming message is converted to their preferred language.
WhatsApp gets message translation on Android and iOS
The new feature has different levels of language support depending on your device. Android users will have access to translations between six languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic. On the other hand, iPhone users will have support for a much wider range of languages at launch, drawing from all of the languages supported by Apple‘s own Translate app:
- Arabic
- Dutch
- English
- French
- German
- Hindi
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Mandarin Chinese
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Vietnamese
The company says the translations are handled directly on your device to protect user privacy. This is a critical detail for a service that prides itself on end-to-end encryption. The fact that the translation is handled on-device means that WhatsApp cannot see the content of your chats, even while it’s translating them. Your phone will download the necessary language packs for future translations. The platform also says it plans to add support for more languages in the future.
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