Twitter appears to be preparing to roll out a feature that would automatically translate posts into your preferred native language, according to a Twitter page I saw today.
Last October, Twitter's Biz Stone authored a blog post that indicated that Twitter would soon be arriving languages beyond Twitter's native English and Japanese, including French, Italian, German, and Spanish. But that post, I believe, was designed to announce translations to the Web site (including words like “following,") rather than translating the posts themselves.
The results page (from one of Wednesday's trending topics, “Bloodbuzz Ohio") allows a user to filter a tweet by language, from Arabic to Icelandic to Thai. But just above that appeared a clickable option to translate the tweets on the page to my preferred language, English.
That may be because one of the tweets that appeared on the page was posted in Dutch. Unfortunately, clicking the “Translate" link didn't work this morning, but by this afternoon it had, with the translation supplied by Google, as you can see in the graphic below. There was also an option to expand the short link to the full URL, without actually being forced to click through.
There are several Greasemonkey scripts that perform auto-translation of Twitter tweets, but this is the first time I've seen a native Twitter auto-translation function. If Twitter begins to overhaul its search results with the auto-translation, URL-expansion, and the new popularity priorities, the Twitter experience may radically changed over the next few months.
Last October, Twitter's Biz Stone authored a blog post that indicated that Twitter would soon be arriving languages beyond Twitter's native English and Japanese, including French, Italian, German, and Spanish. But that post, I believe, was designed to announce translations to the Web site (including words like “following,") rather than translating the posts themselves.
The results page (from one of Wednesday's trending topics, “Bloodbuzz Ohio") allows a user to filter a tweet by language, from Arabic to Icelandic to Thai. But just above that appeared a clickable option to translate the tweets on the page to my preferred language, English.
That may be because one of the tweets that appeared on the page was posted in Dutch. Unfortunately, clicking the “Translate" link didn't work this morning, but by this afternoon it had, with the translation supplied by Google, as you can see in the graphic below. There was also an option to expand the short link to the full URL, without actually being forced to click through.
There are several Greasemonkey scripts that perform auto-translation of Twitter tweets, but this is the first time I've seen a native Twitter auto-translation function. If Twitter begins to overhaul its search results with the auto-translation, URL-expansion, and the new popularity priorities, the Twitter experience may radically changed over the next few months.
