Now we can watch and understand all the Instagram Stories in the world: the platform translates them for us, as it already does with other types of content.
Giuseppe Croce Journalist
Peppe Croce, journalist since 2008, deals with electronic devices and new technologies applied to the automotive world. He joined Libero Tecnologia in 2018.
There’s a new option coming for Instagram Stories: it’s of the last hours the announcement via the app’s official Twitter profile regarding the introduction of automatic translations for that particular format. Now, users will be able to read the text in their own language with a few simple taps, directly from the main view.
So Stories are one of the most popular formats and used by subscribers to the platform. Immediate and versatile, with an “expiration” date of 24 hours after publication, this content finally has the opportunity to further increase its audience by including those who, until now, had been left out because of the language barrier. While Instagram has long added shortcuts to many sections of the app (specifically, since 2016) to access text translation in their own idiom, stories had been excluded from this group, leaving a large portion of what the social’s users share on a daily basis uncovered.
Instagram Stories, how translations work
Similar to what happens with normal posts that scroll through the timeline, from captions to comments and biographies in profiles, Stories too can now rely on translation simply with the tap of the finger. In fact, once you access the story, if the app detects a different language than that of the operating system, it will show the words “See Translation” in the upper left corner of the screen.
Tap the item, and a small box will appear at the bottom of the display, where you can see the text elements “intercepted” in the screen, with reference to the language used and its conversion. This is a very simple step but capable of satisfying a large number of people.
This happens thanks to the amount of idioms covered by the Instagram application. According to reports from the platform, the support currently includes as many as 90 languages, a choice that will make the social network based on visual communication even more global.
Instagram Stories, what’s missing?
Automatic translations of texts in Stories did not come completely unexpected. A few months ago, app developer Alessandro Paluzzi had introduced them to followers via his Twitter profile, pointing out how the development team was working on the feature.
Doing the math on Instagram, the last step remains audio translations. While Instagram has been integrating automatic English subtitles into Stories since last May, the next goal could be caption translation.
There’s currently no information on the timing of this feature, but given the path it’s taken, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it pop up soon.