Language is often a major barrier to successful communication. For this reason, when you talk to friends, foreign lovers, or coworkers from the other side of the world through messaging apps, expressing yourself correctly can be quite a challenge.
In today’s tutorial, we will explain a little trick to automatically translate all those messages in real time when chatting in applications such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger.
How to automatically translate messages on Telegram, WhatsApp, and other instant messaging apps
As you may have imagined, neither WhatsApp nor Telegram have added any native function to translate texts, and of course, we are not going to recommend any third-party app to do the dirty work. Instead, we will use GBoard, the Google keyboard that is installed as standard on most Android phones.
The steps to follow are really simple, and as you will see, they allow enough fluidity to hold a conversation quite comfortably. Let’s go there!
- Open Telegram, WhatsApp, or the messaging app you will use to chat.
- Click on the text box where you are going to send the message.
- When the Google keyboard opens, instead of typing, click on the 3-dot icon that appears in the upper right corner of the keyboard.
- Among all the available options, select “ Translate ”.
- This will open a new text bar where you will write the message you want to send. The keyboard will automatically translate that text and place it in the chat submission bar.
- Important: Remember to select the input and output language before you start writing.
- Finally, when you have everything ready, click on the send button, and that’s it!
In the same way, you can also use the keyboard to translate the messages you receive, although in this case, the management is much less agile. Also, you will have to be careful to change the source language to the target language. Do not forget this detail.
Samsung keyboard (and other keyboards)
As we said, GBoard is a very popular keyboard, but there are many keyboard apps for Android, and some phones even have their own native keyboard.
This is the case, for example, of the Samsung Galaxy, which uses Samsung’s proprietary keyboard. If you have a Galaxy the process would be very similar:
- Enter the chat and click on the text box where you are going to start writing the message.
- When the Samsung keyboard opens, click on the translate icon that you will see at the top of the keyboard.
- Then, in “Translation and YouTube” select the “Google” option and click “Continue”.
- From here, follow the same steps as with the Google keyboard: select the source and destination language and start writing the message.
- After writing the message, click on the translate icon in the lower right area of the keyboard.
- The translated text will automatically appear in the chatbox, ready to be sent.
For the rest, as you can see, it’s a rather silly trick, but one that’s very practical to make yourself understood without getting in the way when communicating with people who don’t speak your mother tongue. Especially to use expressions that you do not master too much or set phrases that are generally the most difficult since they are not literally translated into other languages.
