Twitter: Coming soon in a language for you

Twitter recently announced the Twitter Translation Center, a product the microblogging site describes as “a major step toward making Twitter more easily accessible by people around the world”. Twitter is hoping to crowdsource translations from users in order to launch in additional languages to the site.

“Translators will be translating the product itself, not the Tweets. If you go to the settings page on Twitter.com and change your language, you’ll see what we mean,” said Twitter on its blog.

The site is currently available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. These languages are also included in the Translation Center. Indonesian, Russian and Turkish have been added to the Translation Center, as Twitter plans to translated to those languages next.

“We plan to introduce more languages throughout the year, such as Portuguese.”

“Crowdsourcing translations isn’t new for us. Since October, 2009, we’ve counted on Twitter users to volunteer as translators and help us localize Twitter. For this launch, we created a completely new system, based on feedback from translators, to improve the translation experience,” added Twitter.

The Translation Center allows any Twitter user to sign up, choose a language and translate immediately. The site hopes translators can now help localize twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone and iPad, Twitter for Android, Twitter Help and the Twitter Business Center. The Center’s search functionality now has phrase tagging, special translator profiles and enabled commenting on phrases.

For the moment Translation Center is only open to users who speak French, Indonesian, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. You can follow @translator for the latest updates.