After arriving on the iPhone, the translations of messages on WhatsApp also into Italian are finally arriving for Android users. According to what was stated by WABetaInfoa portal that discovers and disseminates the news present in the beta version of the famous messaging app, WhatsApp is concretely expanding its message translation capabilities on Google’s mobile operating system by introducing 13 new languages, including Italian, for a total of 19 language packs. At the moment the news is only affecting a few beta testers and is not available in the stable version of the app, the one we all use, but the update could arrive in the next few weeks.
WhatsApp will support Italian translations on Android
Going into a little more detail, the beta update for Android, characterized by the version number 2.26.12.4, introduces a significant extension of the languages available for translation. Previously, the system was limited to a few options – Arabic, Hindi, English, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish – and a special package for automatic language detection. With the new release, the total number of language packs (excluding the auto-detection one) goes from 6 to 19. The 13 new languages added are as follows:
- Czech
- Simplified Chinese
- French
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Latvian
- Dutch
- Polish
- Swedish
- German
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
These packages are installed directly on the smartphone, avoiding sending messages to external servers for translation. This approach has a direct impact on privacy. End-to-end encryption, one of the pillars of WhatsApp, prevents third parties (including the platform itself) from accessing the content of your conversations. If the translation took place on remote servers, this principle would be weakened. By processing messages locally instead, WhatsApp is able to integrate new features without compromising the existing security model.
It should be clarified that, at least for now, real-time machine translation is still under full development. On iOS devices, for example, users still have to manually translate messages via the context menu. On Android, the situation is evolving: some beta testers can already use the new packages to translate messages, but the function is not yet available to everyone. Soft release is a common practice in software development and serves to test stability and performance on a large scale before global deployment.
WABetaInfo suggests that the arrival of the language packs in question could lead to support for voice message transcriptions in all the languages for which these packs are available in the not too distant future. This is because, as the source in question explains, these same packages «they are used for both translation and transcription» and then «it is possible that they will soon also support voice message transcription».
The availability of the feature
At the moment the news we told you about is still limited to a small group of users who have installed the beta version of the app from the Play Store. Its expansion to everyone, including those using the stable version of WhatsApp, could happen in the coming weeks.
