As world wide as the web is, language barriers still often limit how much of a site people can explore. Well, Reddit is using AI in an attempt to lessen this issue. The company announced Redditors across more than 35 countries will soon be able to automatically translate their entire feeds. The tool first launched in France earlier this year. The machine learning-powered feature is now available in Brazil and Spain, where Redditors can click a translate icon displayed in the overflow menu.

As part of January's The Future of Translation series, we delved into our predictions on what was next for the Language Services Industry in 2020 and beyond. One of the most exciting developments that we mentioned in our series was the evolution of Artificial Intelligence Translation. But the question remains: Why should you care? What exactly does the evolution, and adoption, of AI-powered translation mean for your business? So, without further ado… Let's get into it!

'"There is certainly the incentive for other social media platforms to develop their own AI translation functions too. Google is also moving forward on AI translation. Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and others will have to get on board as well, if they want to remain competitive and continue to capture a large share of the reading and viewing market.Marketers will gravitate toward those channels that offer accurate AI translations, as they strive to reach global markets. The savings in time and money are just too attractive. And the opportunities to connect with a global audience for marketing purposes is just too critical.

And it is rapidly becoming the choice of marketers who want to gain a large audience, spread their brands and develop relationships that will result in trust and ultimately sales. But competition is fierce, and marketers who must craft content are finding it increasingly difficult to cover all of the social media platforms they want to. One of the solutions is to use AI-powered tools to save manpower and to improve efficiency. The AI tools available now allow marketers to generate more content faster; bots can analyze the performance of content; AI tools find and sort data on customer profiles by mining information of users; AI tools are also used to monitor all comments of users/consumers; and marketers even use AI to collect data on influencers and match the right influencers to their brands. There are more than two billion users of Facebook, and the majority are not English-speaking.

The latest scare story around the rise of robots is that within 120 years all human jobs will be automated. If that study from Oxford University is to be believed, we're just 3 to 4 generations away from perpetual holiday. The report goes on to predict when AI will outperform humans and -- more interestingly -- how. Some aspects will be of genuine concern to certain industries: AI will be a better driver than human heavy goods vehicles drivers by 2027, AI will write better novels than we can by 2049, and, closest to today, AI will be better at translation by 2024. AI has the potential to significantly reshape the translation sector, as it's doing to many other industries already. However, given that the last time human translators were pitted against machine translation (in February) that 90 percent of the automated translation was judged "grammatically awkward," that is a bold prediction.