Twitter To Support Filipino, Malay, Hindi, and Chinese In Coming Weeks

After surpassing the milestone of 100 million active users worldwide, the San Francisco based social networking giant Twitter has announced that it will be adding support for five Asian languages including as Hindi, Filipino, Malay, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese in the coming weeks. That will bring the total number of supported languages to 17.

While Twitter didn’t explain exactly what it meant by “adding support,” we assume that it will offer the entire Twitter experience in the languages mentioned above, including the ability to tweet and hopefully view your tweets in these languages. This will be similar to what it currently offers in Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Dutch, and so on.

Previously, Twitter stated that its translation center has been a resounding success with 200,000+ translators across all languages. It had also launched 100 percent crowd-sourced translations in Indonesian and Dutch in less than a month after its first call for community involvement.

These localized translations are primarily driven by community volunteers who use the tools provided by Twitter’s Translation Center. This was opened up earlier in the year, aiming to offer a localized version of all parts of Twitter’s web interface, support pages, desktop and mobile apps. Twitter works closely with a select group of the most active translators to maintain these localized versions of the service.

As far as Indian languages go, tweeting has been possible over the last couple of years thanks to Google’s Indic transliteration bookmarklets. But Twitter has officially never offered a regional version either on Twitter.com or its mobile apps, which is quite surprising considering the popularity of Twitter among Indians.

However, it must be noted that Twitter had called for volunteers to translate Hindi earlier this month, signalling the arrival of a Hindi version of Twitter.com for those who aren’t comfortable with English.