It takes a community to translate Twitter

By
Monday, 1 August 2011

Twitter celebrated its first non-English launch in April 2008 with the release of Twitter in Japanese. In November 2009, Twitter launched it’s second and third languages: Spanish and French. And, with today’s launch of Dutch and Indonesian, Twitter has been fully translated into eleven languages.

Dutch and Indonesian were the first languages to be fully translated by community volunteers using our Translation Center that opened earlier in the year. Volunteers translate twitter.com, support pages, desktop and mobile applications — everything except the Tweets. Then, a select group of the most active translators work closely with the team at Twitter to maintain localized versions of the service.

Thanks to the active and growing Twitter community (200,000 translators and counting), the launch of today’s two languages is our fastest to date. From the first calls for community involvement to today’s launch, the localization process for Dutch and Indonesian took just one month. We will be using this new process to translate Twitter into many more languages soon. Next up: Filipino and Malay. If you speak one of these (or other) languages, visit our Translation Center to contribute to Twitter’s localization efforts.