At the moment Twitter’s web interface is only available in four languages – English, Japanese, French and Spanish. Also on the way now are Italian and German.
So Twitter Inc have decided to increase support for the world’s languages, which is an excellent move. They’ll be asking users to collaborate on translating the interface, which again is good. The language community, made up of fluent users and some professional translators, knows best. Then everyone wins.
Twitter Inc haven’t said exactly how they’ll choose the next languages. But we can ask for Welsh. Here’s how.
- Go to http://twitter.com/translate
- Click the link “Sign up with your username and language”.
- Type your Twitter username.
- Select “Welsh” from the list.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Welsh speaker or not. Welsh can belong to everyone!
I’m calling it a “vote”. You might as well use your vote for a language you’d like to see supported, even if you’re not a speaker.
Let’s not wait months and months for Welsh to get support – we can ask now. If they receive a high number of requests, it may spur them into offering Welsh.
Facebook made a similar move a while back. The whole thing was a game, with scores and a leaderboard for contributions. This resulted in a very rapid translation, completed in around three or four weeks as I recall. Twitter will be even quicker, I think we’ll do it in mere days.
In fact, Welsh was among the first languages to be supported by Facebook. This was mainly because there was a lot of demand expressed noisily, via a group.
“The squeaky hinge gets the grease.”