In October 2009 Twitter announced that it was translating itself into French, Italian, German and Spanish (FIGS) and that more languages were in the pipeline. And following a lead from Facebook, Twitter announced that it was crowdsourcing the translations through Tweeter volunteer linguists. Well, over three months have gone by so I thought I would check on how Twitter is doing on this project.

Officially, they have not completed localization yet and Twitter is only available in English and Japanese. The following quote is from their website:

Picture 47

Hey Twitter, shouldn’t you update that page? What languages are you currently working on? None, according to your website. And who are the top translators? I didn’t see any links.

Upon further inspection, Twitter has translated its GUI into the promised FIGS languages. Users can select the language of their choice in their Twitter settings panel.

Picture 46

But Twitter has not translated its Help, Terms, Privacy pages among others. These pages are translated into Japanese but not into FIGS. I would be shocked if Twitter crowdsourced some of these translations anyway. Especially the legals texts which would probably be translated by legal experts. 

The Translators Badge

Picture 48 Is Level 10 indeed the highest? @Sean has a Level 11. Well OK, Sean heads up Internalization (I18N) at Twitter Japan but still, how could Level 10 be the highest when you  have a Level 11? (update the page!)

Picture 50

Why are they using Google Docs?

One of the things I found odd is that Twitter based their crowdsourcing technology on Google Docs. Isn’t security an issue? 

Picture 49

Bottom line, Twitter did not do as well as Facebook in implementing translation crowdsourcing and are slow in bringing the new languages to market.