Twitter's Bing translation tool exits as quietly as it entered
For two months, Twitter users could use Bing's translation feature to translate tweets into different languages. Now that's gone.
The Bing translation feature in Twitter that quietly made an appearance two months ago has suddenly gone away, according to many users.
The feature, which showed up earlier this year, allowed Twitter users to quickly translate posts that were in another language. At the time, it was viewed as surprising that Twitter used Microsoft's translation tools, rather than Google's.
According to The Next Web, which collected a series of tweets over the last few days, Twitter quietly killed the feature sometime this week. It's not clear, however, whether the feature is just on hiatus and could come back in the future.
That Twitter added any translation offering to its service was important. The US-based company is seeing most of its growth come internationally, and users are now seeing tweets in different languages more frequently. Being able to quickly translate those tweets and see what's being said has been an important addition for some users.
As Twitter has noted on several occasions, it often tries out new features. From time to time, those experiments become permanent features, while in others, they are nixed. It appears at this juncture that the translation feature has joined the second group.
When Bing's translation feature came to Twitter, on the eve of the World Cup, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touted the addition, tweeting, "Futbol, football, fuβball, Soccer: @Bing on @Twitter can help translate the beautiful game." He has yet to tweet anything related to the feature now being nixed from the service.
CNET has contacted both Twitter and Microsoft for comment. We will update this story when we have more information.