By Hannah Johnson
Twitter is now available in Dutch and Indonesian as of Monday, thanks to a crowd-sourced team of volunteers who translated Twitter’s applications, support pages and home page.
Volunteer translators can sign up via Twitter’s Translation Center to contribute to translations of Twitter’s apps and pages.
Twitter is now available in 11 languages: Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Filipino and Malay up next, according to the company blog. Given the power of social media for authors to promote their works, whether self-published or traditionally published, more languages means more authors can reach readers in their native languages.
One Comment
I’m glad to see everyone chipping in to help translate the interface into as many languages as possible. I think this is a very effective method for social networking sites to explore for certain parts of their site; I know facebook does the same with its language parameters.
However, it would not be possible to do this for the important parts of the site, for example the disclaimer notices, privacy notices etc. There’s no way random people would be able to produce a reliable translation, and the site could find itself in serious trouble. Companies with experience in Dutch translation are the way forward.