14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been moving to offer its site in more languages. With the help of volunteers, Twitter is now available in 17 languages. Of course, Twitter is not stopping here and more are on the way. The latest update brought support for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Tagalog and Malay.
The Twitter.com site is now fully translated into these languages, which join the existing list.
"Last week’s announcement of 100 million active users worldwide shows Twitter’s current reach; with these new languages Twitter will now be more easily accessible to almost half a billion people around the world," Twitter explained.
Twitter started its translation process with the more traditional options, European languages like Italian or French. But after that initial batch, Twitter moved to make available translations for its most engaged audiences which, more often than not, are from emerging markets and developing worlds.
You'll notice that of the 17, at least half of the countries where translations are available aren't what most people would cite as important internet markets. But the web is growing even faster in those parts than it is in the developed world.
"Twitter now fully supports 17 languages. Our crowd-sourced translation process relies on a dedicated community of volunteer translators to both translate and moderate twitter.com, support pages, Twitter apps and more. Many thanks to our 290,000 (and counting) volunteer translators," Twitter explained.
The secret to Twitter's rapid roll-out of new languages has been the number of volunteers who offered to translate parts of Twitter into their language. This also explains why translations became available in emerging markets before they were available for more traditional locations, the users are just more engaged.
"We will continue to add more languages to the Translation Center for crowdsourced translation. Coming soon to the Translation Center: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish and Hungarian," Twitter promised.