About 62 million people should now find it rather easier (or perhaps, for the first time, possible) to use Twitter.  Last night, Twitter acknowledged the world’s Italian-speaking population by announcing support for the Italian language.

Twitter first moved beyond English by launching in Japanese in April of 2008.  More recently, it’s added support for Spanish and French.  Obviously, every time Twitter does something along these lines, it allows for the possibility of adding a lot more users.

Google has launched some new features for Google Translate, while altering the look of the service. In addition to redesigning the site, the new features are aimed at making it faster and easier to translate text between 2,550 language pairs. Google Translate works for 51 languages, representing 98% of Internet users, according to the company.

One new feature is the ability to translate instantly. There used to be a "translate" button, but now it just translates your text as you type it.

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Mobile in Spanish. This is a Spanish-language version of the Yahoo Mobile home page, which is customized specifically for U.S. Hispanic consumers, and is available on over 1,900 devices.

"By bringing together U.S. Hispanic consumers’ favorite content and services from across the Internet, Yahoo! Mobile en Español enables users to create both culturally and personally relevant mobile experiences," a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebPronews.

Google has released a couple of new Labs projects. The first one is called Script converter, and the second one is called Related Links.

The Script Converter Lab lets users read the text of any script in the supported languages, which currently consist of:

- Hindi
- Bengali
- English
- Gujarati
- Kannada
- Malayalam
- Marathi
- Nepali
- Tamil
- Telugu

All you have to do is enter text or a web address in the box, select the language you want to read it in, and press convert.

Many products are initially available in English, and then branch out into languages like French, Italian, German, and Spanish.  (There’s even an acronym, FIGS.)  But Google Search by voice broke with tradition – and started to make its way into a huge market – by moving straight from English to Mandarin Chinese today.

Google announced today that it has added 285 languages to the Google Translator Toolkit. It now has a total of 345, and Google says it can translate between 10,664 language pairs. The interface itself is availalbe in 35 languages.

Facebook has added Latin to its list of languages that the social network now supports (there are more than 70 of them). Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali have also been launched.

There are all sorts of reasons for English speakers to view foreign websites (for info on the latest performance car parts available in Japan, for example, or for local coverage of any news event), and presumably a few people who don’t speak English would like to see our sites, too.  Google’s introduced a translation gadget to help them.

Google has introduced Google Sites in Hebrew and Arabic. This makes 40 languages that Google Sites now supports.

To change the language in Google Sites, simply go to More Actions > Manage Site > General. Site Collaborators can change the language of the interface by going to the user settings page from the My Sites list. If no language is set, Google uses the browser language setting.

Google announced today that it has added nine new languages to Google Translate. That brings the total number of languages supported up to 51, as well as 2,550 language pairs, including all 23 official EU languages.

Language barriers can make communicating the simplest things painful; no one wants to do a sort of hokey pokey just to find the nearest restroom.  However, Google’s attempting to leap way past basic human needs and help with complicated manuscripts by introducing translation technology to Google Docs.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard came online in late February as a way of offering "performance information" about Google’s various products.  The information was only available in English, however, and Google’s now letting users all over the world become more well-informed with the introduction of 24 new languages.

Facebook’s reach in Africa may have been extended today.  A Swahili version of the social networking site was formally released, and there’s word that alternatives in both Hausa and Zulu are liable to appear in the near future, as well. 

Here’s an interesting fact for you: India is the world’s second-largest country in terms of population.  And here’s one more detail: by unveiling Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu interfaces, Facebook has put itself in a good position to pursue India’s citizens.