The new languages are Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu and users can head on over to the Translation Center and start working today.

The Translation Center, launched in 2011, is a giant crowdsourcing program that allows users from dozens of languages to help translate Twitter (the product, not the actual tweets). Twitter says that over 425,000 people have helped with translations. Because of their work, Twitter is available in 22 languages – a number which is about to jump to 26.

Twitter had this to say in a blog post:

As we prepare to add Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu to Twitter, we’ve developed new ways to ensure that Tweets and hashtags will work properly in right-to-left languages. We’ve also made changes behind the scenes to give right-to-left language speakers a localized user experience. As soon as our volunteers have completed their translation work, we’ll make Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu available for everyone on Twitter.com later this spring.

Translation Center is now open to #Arabic, #Farsi, #Hebrew, #Urdu. Please help us translate Twitter to these languages! twitter.com/translator/sta…

— Translator(@translator) January 25, 2012

The most recent language addition to Twitter was Swedish, which became available earlier this month.

[Image Courtesy Dave Parker, Flickr]

Twitter says over 400,000 volunteers have contributed to its translation center. This was launched last February as a means of crowdsourcing translations from Twitter users. Twitter has actually been crowdsourcing translations since 2009, but the center introduced a new system for doing so, relying on feedback from translators to make it better.

Other recently launched languages include: Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Polish. You can see the entire list here:

“As the number of volunteer translators grows, we’ll explore new ways to empower users to translate and localize Twitter for even more communities,” Twitter says in a blog post. “Expect to see further improvements to the Translation Center in the coming year, including new translation tools and more opportunities to help make Twitter accessible to every person on the planet.”

Twitter has an official Translator account that you can follow to keep abreast of further updates regarding the center and Twitter translation in general.

Now it has a new input feature for handwriting. With the latest Android update, you can use your touchscreen to write characters. You’ll see a pen icon next to the mic icon for speaking.

Check it out:

“Our goal is to break down the language barrier, all the time, everywhere,” says Google Translate software engineer Daniel Keysers. “By adding handwriting input directly into our Android app we hope to help you get translation done even more quickly and easily. Sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want translated, sometimes you can’t type it, and sometimes it’s easier just to write it. We think of handwriting on the touchscreen as another natural input that you may want to use to complement the keyboard, microphone, or camera.”

“This is still an experimental feature,” notes Keysers. “It’s available in Chinese and Japanese, and you can enable it for English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish if you like. (We currently only support single-character input for Chinese and Japanese.) Just as with speech recognition and our translations themselves, our handwriting recognition happens in the cloud, allowing us to continually improve accuracy without requiring you to download new versions of the app.”

The latest version of the app is currently available in the Android Market, and works on tablets and phones running Android 1.5 and up.

Duolingo is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn, and it first jumped on everyone’s radar earlier this year. Back then he told TechCrunch:

The solution was to transform language translation into something that millions of people WANT to do, and that helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals: language education,” von Ahn writes. It is estimated that there are over 1 billion people learning a foreign language. So, the site that we’ve been working on, Duolingo, will be a 100% free language learning site in which people learn by helping to translate the Web. That is, they learn by doing.

And today, it looks like the program is in its early stages of actualization. Duolingo has announced that today, November 30th, marks the start of the private beta period:

Having not yet been able to play with Duolingo, it’s easy to explain how it works because it’s such a beautiful concept. Once you choose the foreign language that you wish to learn (Spanish or German, with French, Italian and Chinese on the way), Duolingo gives you foreign language phrases from actual pages around the web. It only gives you phrases that match up with your level – like beginner, intermediate and advanced.

You then go to work translating those phrases. Duolingo helps you out with suggestions if you get stuck on certain words and everyone’s translations are submitted to be voted on so that the community can choose the best translations. The experience also includes some sort of language tutorials for words that you had trouble with.

In theory, Duolingo could help people learn another language while doing something more important – translating the far reaches of the internet. It’s basically crowdsourced translation as a game. Pretty neat, huh?

You can visit the Duolingo site to register for a private beta invite via email. I know I’m anxiously awaiting my chance to give it a try, although I know I must be patient -

Check out the video they just dropped –

“Once you’ve installed the extension, refresh Google+ and you’ll see Translate links next to posts and comments. Click the links to instantly see translations,” he says.

Here are some pictures of the extension in action:

“I’d like to clarify that this extension is currently experimental, as we figure out the best way to integrate translation into the Google+ community,” Estelle says in an update to the original post.

Judging by the comments, people seem to like it pretty well, though some are wondering why it has to come in the form of an extension rather than just a Google+ feature itself.

I can see them making it a feature at some point, but as Estelle said, it’s still experimental. They would probably like to make sure they get it right first.

“Twitter continues to grow around the globe at a record pace,” the company says on its official blog. “Just a year ago, we delivered 65 million Tweets a day. Today, we generate over 200 million Tweets per day. One year ago, there were approximately 150,000 registered Twitter apps. Now, there are more than one million that connect to Twitter. And our team has grown from 250 people to more than 600 in the past 12 months.”

“More importantly, Twitter is where people around the globe come to instantly connect to what’s most meaningful to them,” Twitter adds. “This makes Twitter the only place in the world to get a real-time pulse on what people are thinking and doing practically anywhere.”

You used to be able to do that on Google, with a fair amount of help from Twitter, but the companies have so far failed to reach an agreement that would extend that functionality (realtime search).

As far as international expansion goes, the company did expand on a language basis today, by adding Dutch and Indonesian, making Twitter available in a total of 11 languages.

These two languages were the first to be fully translated by the Twitter community of volunteers, using the Twitter Translation Center.

Twitter also has a new office in New York:

While Twitter has not said how much the new funding is, it is thought to be around $800 million.

"Translators will be translating the product itself, not the Tweets. If you go to the settings page on Twitter.com and change your language, you’ll see what we mean," explains product manager Jinen Kamdar. "Crowdsourcing translations isn’t new for us. Since October, 2009, we’ve counted on Twitter users to volunteer as translators and help us localize Twitter. For this launch, we created a completely new system, based on feedback from translators, to improve the translation experience."

"The new Translation Center allows any Twitter user to sign up, choose a language and begin translating immediately," adds Kamdar. "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."

Twitter is currently offered in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The company says the next languages will be Indonesian, Russian and Turkish, and these have been added to the Translation Center.

What it does is allow you to point your phone’s camera at something and automatically get search results. Google recently acquired Plink, a visual search company that made a mobile app that lets users take a picture with their phone to identify paintings and artworks. The acquisition was made so that the team could work on Google Goggles.

Now Google Goggles lets you point your camera at a word in a different language and get it translated. You can use a "region of interest" button to draw a box around specific words, press the shutter button, and if Google recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate in various languages.

"The first Goggles translation prototype was unveiled earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and could only recognize German text," Google says. "Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages. Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well."

The latest version of Google Goggles also has improved barcode recognition, more artwork, recognition of more products and logos, an improved user interface, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery.

"Collaboration is an important part of translation," says Kartik Singh, Software Engineer for the Translator Toolkit. "Whether you work with editors to translate documents, customers to clarify terms or project managers to meet deadlines, working with other translators is key to making high-quality translations."

"Just like chat in Gmail, you can send instant messages to colleagues, friends, family and groups directly from within Translator Toolkit," explains Singh. "All the features and settings of chat are the same as what you’re used to, including going on the record to save your translation chats in Gmail. If you don’t want to be interrupted as you work on a translation, you can simply go invisible or turn off chat through the Translator Toolkit settings."

Google has also made some other updates to the toolkit. Users can now change their display language and set the toolkit tabs to open or close by default. In addition, Google has expanded entries in the dictionary tab to include useful information, such as parts of speech and alternate definitions.

If you’re translating a word in a certain language, you will find alternate translations for that word for different definitions.

Related Articles:

> Google Can Translate Between Over 10,000 Language Pairs

> Google Translates 9 New Languages

> Google Translating 98% of the Internet’s Languages