Twitter announced today that its popular micro-blogging service will be available in more languages — with a little help from the public. While it is currently only available in English and Japanese, the social network said in a blog post that Twitter will soon have support for French, Italian, German and Spanish (FIGS) with the help of volunteer translators.
Starting today, Twitter is offering a new tool for people with experience in other languages to suggest translations for the Twitter Web site. The company plans to follow up technically by inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators, with the hopes of accumulating enough material so that its micro-blogging service will soon have support for FIGS. Twitter also plans to distribute the translations to its platform developers, making it easier for developers to provide multiple language support as well.
“No matter how sophisticated technology gets, we’re reminded daily that it’s about people and that’s something we’ve taken to heart regarding translating Twitter,” said Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.