iEntry 10th Anniversary RSS Newsletter Advertising
Visit Twellow.com
Text: Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size | Print Print Article | Share: Delicious Digg StumbleUpon Post to Twitter Post to Facebook
4 commentsFriday, November 20, 2009

Twitter Expands Into More Than Just 2 Languages

Twitter Now Supporting Spanish

Update 2 : Twitter is now supporting the French language.

Update:
 Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: 
Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it's only available in English and Japanese.

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter's growth in new users. The company doesn't plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that's just a starting point.

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we'll follow up technically," says Stone.

Twitter Translation tool

"We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," he explains. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster and we'll have enough material to respond by making Twitter available not only in English and Japanese but also French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well."

Our latest numbers have shown that new user registrations have declined slightly for Twitter. The more languages that Twitter supports, obviously the more useful more people will find it. It has a long way to go to get Facebook-like numbers, but this would be a huge step in the right direction (along with the forthcoming "lists" feature) to step up the game.


Related Articles:

New Google Labs: Related Links and Script Converter

Google Search By Voice Learns Chinese (In Limited Fashion)

Google Releases Website Translator Gadget

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

Interesting Strategy

Great to see Twitter is becoming more aggressive in expanding globally. Should be clarified that this feature will help twitter specifically localize their UI (eg.-menu items, field names, site copy). The real benefit in going global occurs when all of your content (eg. - user generated data, articles, etc) can be translated automatically to attract global visitors.

I decided to do this automatically with my website fairly recently. I was able to not only translate my domestic content automatically for visitors, but my content was automatically indexed and page ranked in search engines greatly boosting my original global traffic (e.g.- page views) by several times.

There are different tools that accomplish this, some better than others (I have personally found success with www.nativetung.com). Nonetheless, nice to see more attention being placed on this important topic.

the blog is good i like it

the blog is good i like it very much.

Publish A Comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
14 + 4 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.
SEARCH
Popular WPN Business Resources












Subscribe to WebProNews


Send me relevant info