Join the Flock: Twitter's International Engineering Open House

By
Friday, 27 January 2012

Next week, we will host our first Open House to present the achievements of the Twitter Translation Center, a community platform for translating Twitter’s products. Since it’s launch in early 2011, we have released Twitter in 22 languages, up from just six in 2010.

The amazing level of activity in the Twitter Translation Center has driven us to explore new avenues to scale and deliver quality translation to our international users. For instance, we’ve learned how to work with a community of 425,000 translators, who have collectively produced more than one million separate translations and voted close to five million times on those translations. Recognizing this growth, we’ve added a lot of features to make the Translation Center a better platform for community translation; these innovations include forums, translation search, translation memory, glossary management, moderation tools, and spam and cross-site scripting prevention tools.

We’ve also learnt that introducing a new language requires more than just translations. For each language, we had to ensure that we supported the appropriate date and number formats, that hashtags and URLs could be properly extracted from Tweets in those languages, and that we correctly counted the number of characters in each Tweet.

In order to deliver quality, we built tools to test localized versions of our applications before a launch. Given that all of our translators are volunteers, we wanted to give our translator community a chance to review and test their output before they released it to our users.

What’s next?

Twitter’s impact on the world inspires us to look for new ways to connect and interact with our international users. We continue to address the challenges and lessons on how best to serve community localization at Twitter. To hear more about these tools and topics, join us for an evening of technical discussions and networking during our first International Engineering Open House.

When Thursday, February 2, 2012; 7 pm - 9 pm

Where Twitter HQ, 795 Folsom St, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107

Speakers

  • Nico Sallembien (@nsallembien): A look at Unicode character distribution in Tweets
  • Laura Gomez (@laura): Community Localization and Twitter: Experience, Engagement, and Scalability
  • Yoshimasa Niwa (@niw): Software development for Japanese mobile phones

-@international