Facebook buys machine translation start-up

By Theo Merz

Facebook announced the acquisition on Monday of Mobile Technologies, the Pittsburgh-based developer behind the app Jibbigo. 

It is thought that the translation expertise brought by the startup could be used to translate News Feed posts and offer voice search in multiple languages. 

Jibbigo was launched in 2009 and allows users to make a voice recording or type text in one of 25 languages, and then have a translation immediately appear on screen or read aloud. 

The app, available on the iOS and Android operating systems, makes money through the sale of offline translator packs. 

Facebook will continue to support the translation app for the time being, according to reports, while members of the Mobile Technologies team will join their engineering employees in Menlo Park, California. 

It is not known how many employees of Mobile Technologies will be transferring to Facebook. 

Facebook’s Tom Stocky wrote in a post on the site: “I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a company with an amazing team that’s behind some of the world’s leading speech recognition and machine translation technology. 

“It has always been our mission to make the world more open and connected. Although more than a billion people around the world already use Facebook every month, we are always looking for ways to help connect the rest of the world as well. 

“Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution.” 

The Jibbigo team added in a statement: “Facebook, with its mission to make the world more open and connected, provides the perfect platform to apply our technology at a truly global scale.” 

Facebook currently relies on Microsoft’s Bing to translate comments and News Feed posts. An in-house translation service could make working across different languages a more integral feature of the site.