Twitter's FIGS Speaks In Tongues

Hablo Espanol? Parlez-vous Francais? Spriten Ze Deutsche?  "Gazouiller" and "Cinguettare" translates to "Twitter" in French and Italian. But how do you translate English into other languages on the microblogging site?

On October 8, Twitter which is currently only available in English and Japanese will soon be rolling out support for French, Italian, German and Spanish; i.e. FIGS. Similar to a move made by Facebook last year,Twitter is conducting a casting call for translator volunteers.

Crowdsourcing translations allows Twitter users to get into the act. Members will use the following tool to submit their translation ideas so that Twitter's developers can review the input before making them a reality.

Twitter's translation tool

Twitter languagesAccording to Twitter's blog post, they are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at the onset. Then "as more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster and we'll have enough material to respond by making Twitter available not only in English and Japanese but also French, Italian, German, and Spanish."

The blog also issued an apology: "If yours isn't one of the six languages we're going to be available in soon, we thank you for bearing with us—we'll get there as soon as we can."

While Twitter does well in English speaking countries, it has had difficulty scaling in countries where heretofore translations did not exist. Adding a translation feature should stimulate a major growth spurt in the next few months as Twitter's FIG campaign becomes fully engaged.

Twitter geographic coverage worldwide