On Feb. 23, 2010 I published a blog post entitled: Twitter suspends translation project. This post followed an announcement from Twitter that they were not working any more languages at present and had completed localization into FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish).
I am pleased to say that my blog post prompted the following response from Matt Sanford (@mzsanford) who is the Tech Lead of Internationalization at Twitter:
“We’re working on back-end changes to make translating easier. We’ll re-open for FIGS maintenance (+more langs) soon.”
It would appear that Twitter wants to evaluate the success of the translation project so far and make adjustments before starting with new languages. That sounds like a smart move to me. It would be great if Matt or someone else from Twitter would tell us what they learned from their translation crowdsourcing project, what mistakes (if any) were made in the first phase and what improvements are being made. This will allow other companies to avoid the same pitfalls in their own initiatives.
I would like to thank Pamela Cruz (@pcruz) for obtaining this response from Matt Sanford. And also to thank Mr. Sanford for his candid and gracious response.
Related posts:
Comments