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I am administrator of several Facebook pages. For example, I have a page made for Germany and other German-speaking countries: Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. So the main language should be German to get maximum possible reach.

Recently I discovered a multilingual function, and since then I have been writing posts not only in German but also in other languages which I know: English and Russian. But sadly, the option is not available for posts which were initially sent on one language. So if I post something in at least two languages, I can come later and add as many other languages as I wish. But if the post is written only on one language, there is no way to add second, third, languages anymore - for this specific post.

The same issue doesn't occur on Wall or Groups. There a post written on one language can be improved by adding translation any time. So the theory that they don't want ability to add more languages to old posts doesn't hold water. Another argument against this theory is that they allow adding any number of languages to same post if it was initially written on two or more languages; only monolingual posts are doomed to stay monolingual.

I sent Facebook feedback which says much of what is above, and got a generic response.

Is there any workaround which could work even now in the meantime?


I tried https://m.facebook.com/ and official Android App "Facebook Pages" - and they are even worse because they don't properly support Multilingual Posts at all. Now I could also try Facebook App for Android - but I doubt it will be better since it's very similar to the Facebook Mobile site in my experience.

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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's about an issue which has since been resolved.
    – ale
    Commented May 31, 2017 at 13:43
  • @Ale You reverted my edit and added his self-promotion back.
    – user14334
    Commented May 31, 2017 at 13:44
  • I did. There's plenty to clean up, but your edit was too drastic.
    – ale
    Commented May 31, 2017 at 13:45
  • "Is there any chance they will take it seriously and fix the issue?" There's no way that anyone here can answer that.
    – ale
    Commented May 31, 2017 at 13:50
  • Seems the feature was removed even from the Wall.
    – Leandro
    Commented Sep 6, 2020 at 22:05

2 Answers 2

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I just checked again — the issue was resolved by Facebook. Now it's possible to add additional languages to Facebook posts initially made on one language. Awesome!

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  • I am still facing this issue! How can we add another language to an existing post written in one language? I am lost here. Cant understand if this issue was fixed or not. Thanks Commented Mar 21, 2019 at 14:50
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I'm afraid there is no option to add a translation for old posts posted only in a language.

I have a page where I post in several languages, and I can confirm that I can't add a translation for the posts from the past where I posted in only one language (even if it was a specifically defined language for that post e.g. in French).

I can also confirm that for older post in multiple languages you are allowed to add a translation in a new language.

I consider this a bug or an limitation that Facebook should fix. I'll write to them as well. Unfortunately the multilingual posts in Facebook are quite buggy (e.g., I've just tested and translated posts are not always shown in the right user language, which is something else than your initial question, my point being that this feature of multilingual posts is rarely used, so this is why Facebook cares less about it, but on the other hand the fixes are easy and Facebook should correct them. The more we are in writing to them, the more they will listen (I hope)).

Here is another bug of Facebook with multilingual posts: Facebook link preview in multilingual posts not working

I'm seriously considering having Facebook pages for each language of my users (e.g., one for French, one for Dutch, and one for all the other languages English and Turkish, where I'll post in English). This would make my life more complicated but this is the only solution I see for the moment. Happy to hear other solutions.

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