Twitter Now Available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu

By
Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Today we’re launching Twitter in four new languages: Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu.

We first added these four languages to the Twitter Translation Center on January 25. Thirteen thousand volunteers around the globe immediately got to work, translating and localizing Twitter.com into these languages in record time. Thanks to their contributions, Twitter is now available in right-to-left languages.

These 13,000 volunteers are a vibrant and diverse group. Among those who donated their time and translation skills to make right-to-left languages a reality on Twitter: a Saudi blogger, Egyptian college students, a journalist at the BBC, IT professionals in Iran and Pakistan, an Israeli schoolteacher, the co-founders of the grassroots #LetsTweetInArabic campaign, academics specializing in linguistics, and teenagers in Lebanon.

Some of these volunteers live in regions where Twitter is officially blocked. Their efforts speak volumes about the lengths people will go to make Twitter accessible and understandable for their communities.

Twitter is now available in 28 different languages around the world. Right-to-left languages posed a unique technical challenge, particularly with Tweets containing both right-to-left and left-to-right content. To solve this, our engineering team built a new set of special tools to ensure these Tweets, hashtags and numbers all look and behave correctly.

We want to thank all the volunteers for helping us making Twitter available to every person on the planet. If you want to help translate, join the community to discuss existing translations or suggest a new language for future translation, visit our Translation Center.