Hold a message in a language you do not read and there is a translate option. Turn it on for the whole chat and a bar appears at the top, translating everything as it arrives.
It is the feature that makes a channel in another language subscribable, and the one that makes a group with members on three continents actually work.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Translate one message, or a whole conversation as it happens.
- check_circle Stop being offered translations for languages you read.
- check_circle Know where the translation happens and what that implies.
- check_circle Judge when a machine translation is good enough.
The bar at the top of the chat turns translation on for everything, not only for the message you held.
translate One message or the whole chat
The per-message version is for the occasional foreign sentence. The chat-wide version is for a channel or a group you follow regularly, and it is the one that changes what you can read at all: subscribe to something written in a language you have never studied and follow it daily.
Telegram learns which languages to stop offering. Mark the ones you read and the bar stops appearing for them, which is what keeps the feature from becoming an irritation for anybody who is bilingual.
The translation is produced by a service rather than inside the app, and on some platforms it is the device's own system translation. Either way the text travels to be translated, which is worth knowing before you translate something confidential. In a secret chat, translating a message would defeat the point of the chat.
Four situations
Two where it is excellent, one where it needs care, and one where it should not be used at all.
feed Reading the source rather than a report
group People writing in several languages
rule When the wording matters
lock The one restraint
Excellent for gist at scale. Verify the numbers, and never translate what was meant to stay private.
settings Turning it on
- Hold a message and choose translate For a one-off.
- Use the bar at the top for the whole chat It then applies to everything that arrives.
- Mark the languages you read So you stop being offered translations you do not need.
- Tap to see the original Whenever something reads strangely.
- Check numbers and dates against it Every time they matter.
- Leave it off in confidential chats And entirely off in secret ones.
This page is turning it on. The curriculum step is living with it: running a channel that several language groups read, what translation does to tone, and the conventions that make a multilingual community readable to all of it.
At a glance
- 1Translate
Translate one message or the whole chat.
- 2Skip your languages
Tell Telegram which languages you already read.
- 3Check numbers
Verify names, dates and amounts in the original.
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