Twitter late on Valetine's day (14th/Feb/2011) launched a translation Center a product that is a major step toward making Twitter more easily accessible by people around the world.
The Translation Center allows crowdsource translations from passionate users so as to launch Twitter more quickly in other additional languages.
In addition to the original English version, users can already access Twitter in French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Italian, but the company still lags behind Facebook, which offers many more translation options.
While Twitter has relied on users in the past to help translate parts of its site, the new Twitter Translation Centre is unique in that it invites everyone to participate in this process and even involves an active recruiting drive aimed at attracting volunteers.
How does it work?
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. We also improved the Center’s search functionality, added phrase tagging, created special translator profiles, enabled commenting on phrases and much more.
At this time, we have opened up the Translation Center to users who speak French, Indonesian, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. If you speak any of these languages, you can start helping us translate! Head over to twitter.com/translate and follow @translator for the latest updates.
