Twitter Expands Into More Languages

Update 4 : Twitter is now supporting the German language.

Update 3 : Twitter is now supporting the Italian language.

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.

"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.

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There are 5 Comments. Add Yours.

Chris Gnut
October 10, 2009 at 2:21 am

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 http://www.nativetung.com). Nonetheless, nice to see more attention being placed on this important topic.
adanjay123
November 4, 2009 at 11:13 am

the blog is good i like it very much.
Gabriella
November 20, 2009 at 1:45 pm

Yes, I am glad to see Twitter introduce other languages. I personally helped with Italian and French! It was a bit frustrating at first but, once they figured out some of the kinks (sometimes things just did not work properly) it was a breeze. It was fun and I am glad I was part of the change. Not sure how much I personally got out of the experience other than to say I have a badge on my Twitter profile @SEOCopy
Torsten
November 22, 2009 at 1:01 pm

Like I see in the german market there are a lot of pepole that heard about it. But some didn
Markus
December 17, 2009 at 10:55 am

What about Swedish? Come on.. how hard can it be?