14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been building an international audience, little by little, but, though it has managed to expand so far, it needs more translations to move beyond the wave of early adopters in each country and capture the mainstream audience.
In the past, it has relied on its users for this, and it's now doing it again with a brand new Translation Center to make crowdsourcing translations easier to pick up and faster as a process.
"Today we're announcing a product that is a major step toward making Twitter more easily accessible by people around the world - the Twitter Translation Center," Twitter wrote.
"The Translation Center allows us to crowdsource translations from our passionate users in order to more quickly launch Twitter in additional languages," it continued.
Now, Twitter is only available in English French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Many of these were just introduced last year and Twitter has relied on professional help only for Japanese.
Every other translation was created with the help of Twitter users. However, Twitter is now upgrading the tool enabling them to introduce new translations.
All of the existing languages will be included in the Translation Center, since Twitter is always updated and new phrases introduced. All the Twitter apps are going to need translations as well.
But Twitter is also introducing support for Indonesian, Russian and Turkish in the Translation Center with the hope that users will spring in and provide translations for their language.
These are the regions where Twitter is seeing the most growth, so their choice is obvious. Next up are other languages, including Portuguese, Brazilians are avid Twitter users.
"The new Translation Center allows any Twitter user to sign up, choose a language and begin translating immediately. Translators can now help localize twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone and iPad, Twitter for Android, Twitter Help and the Twitter Business Center," Twitter explained.
"We also improved the Center’s search functionality, added phrase tagging, created special translator profiles, enabled commenting on phrases and much more," it added.