Twitter has added four new languages to their Translation Center, and in a few months users should be able to participate in the conversation in some right-to-left reading languages.
The new languages are Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu and users can head on over to the Translation Center and start working today.
The Translation Center, launched in 2011, is a giant crowdsourcing program that allows users from dozens of languages to help translate Twitter (the product, not the actual tweets). Twitter says that over 425,000 people have helped with translations. Because of their work, Twitter is available in 22 languages – a number which is about to jump to 26.
Twitter had this to say in a blog post:
As we prepare to add Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu to Twitter, we’ve developed new ways to ensure that Tweets and hashtags will work properly in right-to-left languages. We’ve also made changes behind the scenes to give right-to-left language speakers a localized user experience. As soon as our volunteers have completed their translation work, we’ll make Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu available for everyone on Twitter.com later this spring.
Translation Center is now open to #Arabic, #Farsi, #Hebrew, #Urdu. Please help us translate Twitter to these languages! twitter.com/translator/sta…
— Translator(@translator) January 25, 2012
The most recent language addition to Twitter was Swedish, which became available earlier this month.
[Image Courtesy Dave Parker, Flickr]