14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is finally going international and is now announcing that the service is available in Spanish, the first step towards the introduction of several new languages. The translation effort mirrors that of Facebook, as it uses volunteers to provide translations to all of the pages and features on Twitter. The move to introduce several new languages was announced a few weeks ago and it seems that users were eager to get started, as the first language is already available.
Twitter made the announcement in a blog post, as usually, but, interestingly, it was written in Spanish. Thankfully, these days, we have Google Translate. “Earlier this month we invite volunteers to translate into more languages Twitter. Thanks to these enthusiastic volunteers hispanoparlantes, Twitter is now officially available in Spanish. You can change the language or visit Twitter.com Settings and change the language setting in the option at the bottom right corner,” Biz Stone said in Spanish.
Spanish-language users now have a fully working version of the site in their language, which can be set in the settings page, but the rest of the service is exactly the same. This isn't the first language other than English that Twitter is being offered in, as the microblogging site has been available in Japanese for more than a year now. That move, though, was made due to the surprising success of the service in that country, as Twitter was beginning to pick up Steam in the US.
Since then, though, there haven't been any efforts to port the service to other languages, until, last month, Twitter made the announcement that it would start supporting a number of new languages beginning with the FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish) ones. It took three weeks to get the first one on the list, Facebook's Spanish translation took a little less, and the others should be coming soon. After that, Twitter plans to introduce other translations, though it may take some time before it can challenge Facebook's 70 languages.