Facebook uses its own proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) systems to power language translation across its apps and services. The company has invested heavily in natural language processing and machine translation technologies over the years.
Facebook’s AI Translation System
At the core of Facebook’s translation capabilities is an AI system called FbNLP (Facebook Natural Language Processing). FbNLP utilizes neural machine translation, combining neural networks and deep learning algorithms to translate text between languages. Here are some key details about Facebook’s AI translator:
- Developed in-house by Facebook AI researchers over many years
- Uses encoder-decoder neural network architecture
- Leverages massive datasets for training, with billions of translations
- Employs attention mechanism to focus on relevant parts of input text
- Continuously improved through new research and feedback data
FbNLP powers translations across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. When a user posts content or sends a message in one language, FbNLP automatically translates it into other supported languages so more people can understand it.
Language Coverage
Facebook’s AI translation system supports over 100 different languages. This includes major world languages like English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Russian, and Indonesian. The full list of supported languages includes:
| Afrikaans | Georgian | Malayalam | Slovak |
| Albanian | German | Maltese | Slovenian |
| Amharic | Greek | Maori | Somali |
| Arabic | Gujarati | Marathi | Spanish |
| Armenian | Haitian Creole | Mongolian | Sundanese |
| Azerbaijani | Hausa | Myanmar (Burmese) | Swahili |
| Basque | Hebrew | Nepali | Swedish |
| Bengali | Hindi | Norwegian | Tagalog (Filipino) |
| Bosnian | Hmong | Nyanja (Chichewa) | Tajik |
| Bulgarian | Hungarian | Odia (Oriya) | Tamil |
| Burmese (Myanmar) | Icelandic | Pashto | Telugu |
| Catalan | Igbo | Persian | Thai |
| Cebuano | Indonesian | Polish | Turkish |
| Chichewa (Nyanja) | Irish | Portuguese (Brazil) | Ukrainian |
| Chinese (Simplified) | Italian | Portuguese (Portugal) | Urdu |
| Chinese (Traditional) | Japanese | Punjabi | Uyghur |
| Corsican | Javanese | Romanian | Vietnamese |
| Croatian | Kannada | Russian | Welsh |
| Czech | Kazakh | Samoan | Xhosa |
| Danish | Khmer | Scots Gaelic | Yiddish |
| Dutch | Korean | Serbian | Yoruba |
| English | Kurdish (Kurmanji) | Sesotho | Zulu |
| Esperanto | Kyrgyz | Shona | |
| Estonian | Lao | Sindhi | |
| Finnish | Latin | Sinhala | |
| French | Latvian | Slovak |
Facebook continues to expand language support by training its AI translation models on new languages. The company has to gather extensive translated text data in order to add a new language.
How Facebook’s AI Translation Works
Facebook uses neural machine translation powered by deep learning to automatically translate text between languages. Here is an overview of how their system works:
- The source text is input into an encoder neural network that generates a vector representation of the full text meaning.
- The encoder vector passes through a decoder network which outputs translated text in the target language.
- The system is trained end-to-end on massive datasets to optimize translation accuracy.
- Attention layers in the model learn to focus on the most relevant parts of the input text.
- Beam search is used to generate the most probable translation out of multiple candidates.
- The system continuously learns and improves from new data.
By leveraging deep learning on huge sets of translated text data, Facebook’s AI has learned to translate between languages at a very high level of accuracy while continuing to improve over time.
Advantages of Facebook’s Translation System
Facebook’s neural machine translation approach powered by its own AI research offers several advantages:
- High accuracy: The system produces very accurate translations, even for long and complex sentences.
- Context handling: The AI considers broader context beyond just individual words to translate whole phrases and sentences.
- Fluent output: Translations sound natural and human-like in the target language.
- Language flexibility: New languages can be added by training the model on that language’s data.
- Fast and scalable: The system can translate text across billions of users in near real-time.
- Always improving: More data steadily enhances translation quality over time.
Facebook is heavily invested in further developing its AI translation technology to support more languages and deliver the best user experience across its apps.
Conclusion
Facebook utilizes its own sophisticated artificial intelligence called FbNLP to power automated text translations across its platforms. FbNLP uses neural networks trained on massive datasets to translate text between over 100 different languages. The deep learning system provides highly accurate and fluent translations, continuing to improve through new research and data. Facebook’s investments in AI allow billions of users to seamlessly communicate across language barriers.