More than 1.5 billion people use Facebook. And only half speak English. The rest speak so many dozens of other languages, effectively silo'd off from the English speakers and, in many cases, from each other. If you stumble onto a Facebook post in a foreign language, Facebook lets you instantly translate it--in a semi-effective way. And beginning today, millions of people will have the option of instantly translating their own posts into any one of 44 other languages, so that they will automatically show up in your News Feed in your native tongue.

Facebook is using artificial intelligence to allow users to compose one post in multiple languages. The issue is critical given that half of Facebook's customer base doesn't speak English. The social networking giant said it will begin testing an in-house tool called the "multiligual composer." Using the composer, Facebook customer can write one post and viewers will see it in their preferred language. For Facebook, its scale will improve its machine translation models for less common languages.

More than 1.5 billion people use Facebook. And only half speak English. The rest speak so many dozens of other languages, effectively silo'd off from the English speakers and, in many cases, from each other. If you stumble onto a Facebook post in a foreign language, Facebook lets you instantly translate it--in a semi-effective way. And beginning today, millions of people will have the option of instantly translating their own posts into any one of 44 other languages, so that they will automatically show up in your News Feed in your native tongue.