Instagram Reels AI translation: Korean and Japanese added July 2026
Meta's July 14, 2026 update adds French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean to Reels translation on Instagram. Here is the full language list and the dates.
Instagram's AI translation for Reels now covers French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean, added in an update dated July 14, 2026, on top of English, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Kannada. That is Meta's own wording in the update note of Meta's newsroom post on Reels translation, read 2026-10-02. Facebook is listed separately: a June 4, 2026 note says Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, French, Thai and Vietnamese are coming there.
Sume does not run this feature. It is a Meta tool for Reels on Meta's apps. Sume is the route for a dub you build yourself, for platforms that have no such tool.
Which languages did Meta add, and when?
The newsroom post is a running log: it was first published October 9, 2025 and carries dated updates at the top. The table lists them in order.
Note the split between platforms. The July 14 update says the new languages are on Instagram; the June 4 note says the Facebook list is expanding "soon", so it is a plan, not a date.
| Date on the page | What Meta says | Where |
|---|---|---|
| August 2025 | Bidirectional English and Spanish opened to creators | Facebook and Instagram |
| October 9, 2025 | Hindi and Portuguese added | Facebook and Instagram |
| January 16, 2026 | Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Kannada rolling out | Instagram and Facebook |
| June 4, 2026 | Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, French, Thai and Vietnamese "soon" | |
| July 14, 2026 | French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean |
What do I do for a language Meta does not list?
Build the dub as separate steps. Transcribe the original with POST /v1/stt-1.0/transcribe and a language_code hint, translate the text yourself, then synthesize each line with POST /v1/tts-1.0/generate and its language field set. The AI dubbing pipeline walkthrough lays out the joins.
The Sume docs describe these as separate building blocks, not a one-call dubbing product. They do not clone the creator's voice from the API, so the dubbed voice will not match the original speaker the way Meta describes its feature.
Which should I use?
If your audience watches on Instagram and your language is on Meta's list, the platform tool is free and built in; the newsroom page says it is free. If you also publish to another platform, or need a language off the list, plan your own dub.
Either way, ship burned-in captions in the target language for viewers who watch muted. Sume's video captions endpoint takes authored cues, so each language is one job.
Sources
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Written by Sume