Twitter adds Hindi, Chinese, and other languages to its service

Twitter adds Hindi, Chinese, and other languages to its service

2011-09-15 08:07:40 GMT+7 (ICT)

SAN FRANCISCO (BNO NEWS) -- The popular social networking website Twitter on Wednesday added five more languages to its service, including Hindi and Chinese, the company said.

Twitter was initially launched in 2006 as an English-language social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. It celebrated its first non-English launch in April 2008 with the release of Twitter in Japanese, followed by Spanish, French, German and Italian in late 2009.

So far this year, Twitter has already added six new languages after it opened its so-called Translation Center where volunteers are able to translate messages which appear on Twitter.com, support pages, as well as desktop and mobile applications. Twitter says some 290,000 users have already participated in the Translation Center.

On Wednesday, the social networking website announced it has added Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Tagalog (Filipino), and Malay. The six new languages introduced earlier this year were Korean, Turkish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, and Indonesian.

"Last week's announcement of 100 million active users worldwide shows Twitter's current reach," Twitter said in a blog post on Wednesday. "With these new languages Twitter will now be more easily accessible to almost half a billion people around the world."

With the five new languages added on Wednesday, Twitter is now available in 17 languages including English. "We will continue to add more languages to the Translation Center for crowdsourced translation," the blog post said. "Coming soon to the Translation Center: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish and Hungarian."

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