Is the New Twitter Translation Center Worth Any Buzz?

This week Twitter launched its new Twitter Translation Center -- the next step in the company's scheme for becoming more international. Twitter announced this latest step as something that will improve the site's functionality while also broadcasting the company's acknowledgment of a globalized community. But even though Twitter is making a fairly significant deal of this new language support, is it really going to help propel the company into even greater fortune? The main idea behind the Translation Center is crowdsourcing translations so that Twitter can start translating the website -- that is, the actual Twitter product and not every individual tweet -- at a faster pace. Twitter already comes in several languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. However, Twitter acknowledged in its blog post that the Translation Center will have to assist in maintaining these language options through all the future updates Twitter adds to its site. According to the announcement, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish are the next languages in the pipeline -- with Portuguese also in the works for some time this year. The Translation Center lets you sign up to volunteer your translating ability for the Web site -- so that users an actually improve the international functionality of not only Twitter.com, but also Twitter for iPad, iPhone, and Android, as well as the Twitter Business Center and mobile.twitter.com. In the words of the company, "We also improved the Center's search functionality, added phrase tagging, created special translator profiles, enabled commenting on phrases and much more." The buzzworthy part about the Translation Center is Twitter's commitment to keep growing -- rather than just gradually adding new languages, Twitter is turning internationalism into a systematic program. The crowdsourcing technique allows the company to respond to users' needs. Even though Twitter may be a little too self-congratulatory about this step -- after all, adding new languages isn't exactly innovative -- there is a sign that they are doing absolutely what they should be doing. That sign is the Translation Center's use of The Almighty Social Network. By making use of the Twitter network by letting people voluntarily sign up to translate, Twitter is earning major social media potential points.

Social Pro Daily

Is the New Twitter Translation Center Worth Any Buzz?

katy

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