14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has now added another language to the list of official translations, Korean. Users in South Korea will be able to access the site as well as the official mobile apps in their native language and use the local script. South Korea was chosen since the site has seen a huge growth in popularity there in the last year. Cofounder Evan Williams was in South Korea when the announcement was made.
"In the last year, one of the fastest growing countries for Twitter is South Korea. There are now ten times as many Twitter users there than there were just a year ago," Twitter announced.
Twitter made the announcement in Korean, it usually makes this type of announcements in the language now supported, but it provided a translated version for those not speaking Korean, since Google Translate is not a huge help in this case.
"As of today, Twitter will be even easier for Koreans to use. Among other updates, Twitter.com and Twitter's mobile web site are now translated into Korean," Twitter continued.
Korean is now the seventh language Twitter is available in. It started with Japanese, since the service is incredibly popular there. Much later, it added a wave of translations for a number of European languages, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Twitter is going all out with the launch, with translations available for Twitter.com but also for the official mobile apps for the iPhone and Android. It's also partnering with a couple of big local players to promote the service and also offer an integrated experience.
"We want to thank our partner Daumfor displaying top Korean Tweets on their homepage and making it easy to find friends from your Hanmail address book; and LG U+ for working with us to make Twitter available via SMS in Korean for their subscribers (shortcode is #1234)," Twitter explained.
Twitter plans to continue to expand support for other languages and add new ones this year. Since most Twitter users are outside of the US and the service is seeing huge growth in some regions, it makes sense to provide localized versions. For example, you should expect Portuguese to be on the short list of upcoming languages since Twitter is especially popular in Brazil.