Amidst rumours that the microblogging service could venture in to adding video upload for its users and immediate denial, the announcement that Twitter will finally expand and offer translations almost got lost. Similarily to Facebook the Californian startup will crowdsource the translations to its user base. Users interested to help Twitter with the most needed feature right now to continue its world wide growth will have to volunteer. It isn’t clear how volunteers will be selected or where to volunteer.
We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first. 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.
There is no ETA for the project nor is it clear if there are plans to translate in Mandarin or Portuguese. Twitter should have made this move a long time ago already, let’s just hooe we won’t have to cope with Pirate English.
