Twitter asks for help translating

Twitter's translation tool in action.

(Credit: Twitter)

In a decidedly Facebook-style move, Twitter is asking for its users' help in translating the service into new languages. To start, Twitter is focusing on translating the site into French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

Twitter is starting with a small set of translators, but if you want to sign up to translate the service to the language of your expertise, you can enter your information here. They're looking for translators for just about every language from Finnish to Thai. As translations of the site are completed, Twitter also plans to offer up the translation files to the developer community to help translate their apps for Twitter's new markets.

Twitter translators get a special badge on their profile and are given levels (1-10) based on how much translation they have done. Twitter has also built leaderboards for each language being translated. You can see the one for the French translation here. This gives the translators a little more incentive above just knowing that they have contributed.

Twitter's new Translator badge.

(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

At the beginning of 2008, Facebook started a similar user translation effort, which has been a huge factor in the site's international growth. Recently, Facebook also introduced a translation tool that works with Facebook Connect and allows site owners to have their site translated by Facebook users. Twitter is hoping that expanding into new markets through these translations will blow up their user base, just like it did for Facebook.

[compbry15]

No offense but Facebook was far from the first company to crowd-source translations

[tomedes]

Didn't they just raise $100M? Can't they spare a few bucks for professional translators...

[cvaldes1831]

Nah, they need the $100M for their server markets. The cr*ppy architecture is so failure-prone, I'm guessing that they're feeding the hamsters the wrong food and slaughtering them at a record pace.

Save the money on fresh hamsters.

[Harrison912]

I mainly use Twitter to socially market my safety and security web site but I don't ship outside the US so although this is a great idea, it won't really benefit me. Thanks, Harrison.

[cgnut]

Great to see Twitter is becoming more aggressive in expanding globally. You should clarify that this feature will help them 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. Good info Harrison.