So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.
It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.
This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas amid allegations that its traffic has plateaued. Facebook, for example, saw significant growth overseas when it started launching user-translated versions of its site.
To better inform the Twittering masses, we have gone to the trouble of plugging the term "fail whale" into Google Translate to see how you say it in Spanish. That didn't go too well with the algorithm, so we tried "whale of failure" and came out with "la ballena de fracaso." Unfortunately, that just doesn't have the same ring.
But this is not actually the first time that Twitter has toyed with launching a non-English edition. Last year, Twitter board member Joi Ito hyped up the launch of a standalone Twitter Japan site, powered by an investment from Ito's Digital Garage, that was notable because it was ad-supported (Twitter still hasn't rolled out ads or even said that it will for sure).
Biz Stone filled in CNET News on the status of Twitter Japan via e-mail on Tuesday night: "(It's) doing very well. A few of us were there a few weeks ago to launch a brand new mobile service. We had a really fun tweetup in Tokyo."
Twitter hasn't said what the next translations of its site will be, though presumably they'd pick a language that's already spoken by many users or one spoken in a region where it hopes to make big inroads. Or they could just be cutesy and launch in Klingon or Pirate.
This post was updated at 10:40 p.m. with comment from Biz Stone.
MySpace has unveiled the full version of its bilingual MySpace Latino homepage, which has been in a beta test phase since last year and includes content in both Spanish and English. In conjunction with the launch, MySpace additionally announced deals with a number of content partners to kick-start new interest areas on the site.
Unlike MySpace's array of internationally-focused brands, MySpace Latino is geared toward bilingual users in the U.S. The social-networking site, which has been owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media since 2005, has 9 million Hispanic members among its U.S. users.
The new "entertainment partners" in the MySpace Latino launch include the Spanish Broadcasting System, Hispanic news outlet ImpreMedia (which is powering a soccer news site, TodoFutbol), Gibson Guitar, local events site Remezcla.com, and Billboard.
Consistent with MySpace's roots as a music-based community--and perhaps to emphasize its content and media offerings as it loses ground in the social-networking sphere to smaller rivals like Facebook--the new MySpace Latino will offer interviews with Latin bands and "Secret Shows" concerts much like its English-language sibling.
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