Volunteers for the Twitter Translation Center are working to get the social network site ready for Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu.

In another example of crowd-sourced translation efforts, Twitter is opening up to languages that read right-to-left. Volunteer translators are doing the translation and localization groundwork.

The Twitter.com platform itself should be available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu in the spring, “As soon as…volunteers have completed their translation work,” states a recent blog post from Twitter.

Asking site users to do translation work has been controversial in certain cases. A few years ago, professional translators on LinkedIn balked at the social network’s request to get them to translate the platform for free.

With over 425,000 volunteers already contributing to its Translation Center, Twitter apparently isn’t having such trouble.

So how well do these languages tweet?

Despite some diligent research, I couldn’t locate any information on how Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu fit into a 140-character format.

I did find a blog post showing that Arabic could express a sample 130-character English tweet -- in just 93 characters. So despite its dense appearance to non-readers, Arabic is apparently quite compact – and, so, perfectly adapted to Twitter.

Betty Carlson

See Also

• Language Translation, Inc.
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