Twitter has quietly removed the option to translate tweets from their platform.  The addition made it easy for users to translate tweets made in other languages, something that was valuable for those working in international markets or simply those with friends around the world.

The translation service definitely had some hiccups – especially when people were using acronyms, the service would sometimes get confused and offer to translate English tweets from other languages into English.

However, what makes this change really interesting is that Bing has a partnership with Twitter where Twitter allows Bing to have access to tweets for indexing purposes, something that Google has not had for years.  Given this, it would make sense for Twitter to be adding Bing features, not removing them.

Bing Translator is still picking up steam however.  Even as Twitter removes the translation feature, Yelp has announced they have added Bing Translate into their iOS Yelp app, with the change being added to Yelp’s Android app soon.   It is unknown if Yelp will be making the translate feature available on the web version of Yelp or not.