Los Angeles — It is pretty astonishing what a company can accomplish when it is flocked by millions of dedicated users, especially when they are scattered around the globe. Thanks to the efforts of 13,000 volunteers worldwide, following the use of social media in the Arab Spring uprisings, microblogging outfit Twitter has added more support for a few of the languages of North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew.
The move, though perfectly formulated, is unique, since Twitter relied on a crowd-sourced format to help with translations. In a blog post, a Twitter spokesperson revealed the new language support is due to the work of a large and diverse group of volunteers.
13000 volunteers helped Twitter to be translated. DESIGN: GIBRAN ASHRAF
“Thirteen thousand volunteers across the globe immediately settle down to work, translating and localizing Twitter.com into these languages in record time. Thanks to their contributions, Twitter is now available in right-to-left languages,” the official announcement on Twitter read.
In conflict-torn areas of the world, Twitter execs and numerous others are hoping that social media can help bring people together and unite them over commonalities. As the company wrote of the #Jan25 tweets, “A single tweet can bring you closer to neighbors and heroes, engulf you in political change or disaster relief.” It added that these volunteers were from countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, and included scholars, IT professionals, bloggers, even school teachers.
“Among those who donated their time and translation skills to make right-to-left languages a reality on Twitter [are] a Saudi blogger, Egyptian college students, a journalist at the BBC, IT professionals in Iran and Pakistan, an Israeli schoolteacher, the co-founders of the grassroots #LetsTweetInArabic campaign, academics specializing in linguistics, and teenagers in Lebanon.”
Urdu is the official language of Pakistan and is spoken in western India and parts of Afghanistan. Arabic is a variety of dialects is spoken throughout North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Farsi is the official language of Iran and is spoken widely in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as by communities in Bahrain, Yemen, the UAE, and elsewhere. Modern Hebrew is, along with Arabic, an official language of the State of Israel and is spoken by most of the eight million people in Israel.
The map below illustrates Twitter’s new geographic reach:
These languages presented unique challenges for Twitter. To overcome technical hindrance, Twitter’s engineering team had to build a new set of special tools to ensure that these tweets, hashtags and numbers would behave as their counterparts in left-to-right languages.
On the other hand, Twitter is as global as it gets when it comes to social networking, and the company has been adding official support for new languages pretty swiftly as of late. The company has a translation center where it adds requests for its community to localize Twitter in specific languages. Those users then go about doing it on a volunteer basis.
Finally, by including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew, Twitter now supports right-to-left languages for the first time. The company claims that it currently has 13,000 volunteers actively localizing all of Twitter’s sites, emails, and apps into different languages. It is a similar approach to how Facebook handles its localization.