Twitter Announces Crowdsourced Translations

At the moment, Twitter is only available in English and Japanese, but it has announced plans to translate its website into additional languages. It will soon release translations in French, Italian, German and Spanish and will then add other languages as well. These translations will also be included in the Twitter API, allowing developers to utilize them in their third-party clients.

Like Facebook, Twitter will be crowdsourcing its translation efforts, allowing volunteers to make translation suggestions and vote up the translations they believe are most accurate. This speeds up the translation process and helps to ensure that the most accurate translations for words and phrases are used. Twitter is currently testing out the translation system with a small group of people, but will soon allow more people to volunteer.

Volunteers are given a badge on their Twitter page, which both distinguishes them as translators and shows their level, which increases up to level 10 as they complete more translations.

Twitter describes the translation process on their translation page thus:

“Twitterers enabled with our translation tools will see a special set of options on their screen. By clicking the “Translate this page” option on any Twitter.com page, the Translate Box will appear on the screen, pointing to a certain word or phrase. You can type in your own translation or vote on another translation from within the box. The box then jumps to the next phrase until you’ve translated everything on the page. After that, you move to another page. We have another view which allows you to translate everything on the site in a single list. In either mode. you can translate as much or as little as you’d like, and can stop when you’d like without losing your translations. Once we’ve collected a good number of translations for every phrase across the site, we will review them and pick the most accurate one. It’s a fun and easy way for you to help make Twitter accessible to more people around the world.”