This article is in partnership with Day Translations.

Reddit’s CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman has been strategising the site’s global ambitions for a while. Ever since the company received a generous cash boost of $700 million in investments in 2021 and an even more generous valuation at $10 billion, Huffman has been saying that he was looking at international markets for growth. He was quoted saying that internationalisation was a big effort for Reddit and that the investments in the company will be used to improve the site’s performance, add more video functionality and create localised versions in different languages starting from French.

Part of the growth strategy is to use AI tools and make the user experience as seamless as possible.

A Bit of History of Reddit

Reddit is one of those websites that we associate to the “golden age” of social media where people could have fairly balanced discussions and exchange ideas. Reddit was founded in 2005 and it was listed in the Stock Exchange in 2024. Without fancy graphics and interfaces, Reddit at first seems “boring” with a very plain homepage listing the latest discussions in its communities or subreddits.

I joined the site in 2016 but it took me a few years to really make the most of it, discussing various topics of interest which in my case range from houseplants and foraging to remote working.

In 2024 the company made a number of announcements via its CEO Steve Huffman, who shared future plans and visions which involve machine translation.

Machine Translation at Reddit

Huffman clearly linked the growth of the company to machine translation in order to access new international markets.

About half of Reddit’s users are not based in the US and may not speak English as their first language.

French is the first language that the website is using for machine translation, with more languages to follow. The web pages are being optimised for search in French, too, and this is an added point of discovery for new users.

The next language on the list is Spanish.

Additionally, Reddit introduced translation support for community posts in seven languages in addition to English:

• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Swedish.

This feature was introduced in 2023 and it works by clicking on an individual post where the “translate” label is displayed, both in the web version and in the app version.

Reddit’s future is all about growth and translated content is playing a huge part in this. Localised content, i.e., translated content that resonates with a specific local audience, has been identified as a key factor for growth in many industries. Serving localised ads on Reddit would provide a boost for the company’s revenue, after already showing positive signs in its earnings report since being listed as a public company.

In a nutshell, localisation is the future and providing translated content can make a difference to an organisation’s cash flow.