14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook and Google have been going at it in an all-out translation war last week. Perhaps starting to feel a little left out, Twitter decided it was time to go international and has announced plans to launch the site in the commonly used languages French, Italian, German, and Spanish. And, seeing as how translations actually cost a pretty penny, even for a relatively small site (in terms of content) like Twitter, the microblogging service opted to go the Facebook way and ask for the support of the users to get it translated, which is also more in line with its core philosophy.
“Twitter is currently available only in English and Japanese. With some help, we will soon be rolling out support for French, Italian, German, and Spanish,” Twitter cofounder Biz Stone wrote. “No matter how sophisticated technology gets, we're reminded daily that it's about people and that's something we've taken to heart regarding translating Twitter.”
Twitter has been seeing some adoption overseas – nothing along the lines of that in the US and nothing like Facebook but it's still a solid growth. But for a site that is so centered on people and social interaction it's actually kind of surprising to realize that it's only offered in English and Japanese. Why Japanese? Apparently the service was extremely popular in the country a year and a half ago when it was launched there. As for why it took it so long for it to even consider other languages, well, Twitter has been known to take its sweet time introducing new features.
But don't get too excited yet, as Twitter isn't launched in those languages just yet, it just wants to be launched in those languages. “We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first. As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster,” Biz added. You have to hand it to Twitter though – at least it made the tools to make the translation possible and there are sure to be plenty of users willing to help. And as soon as Twitter is done with these four languages it's planning to start expanding the project though it will probably be a while until it gets to the 70 languages Facebook is boasting today.
