Twitter now available in Urdu, 3 more languages

The move, though planned, is unique, since Twitter relied on a crowd-sourced format to help with translations.

“Thirteen thousand volunteers around the globe immediately got 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.


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: 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.”

A point to note is that some of the people working on this project, lived in countries where Twitter is officially banned.

Through this move, Twitter will now be available in 28 languages, in right to left formats, as well as the traditional left to right formats. The engineers at Twitter, said the announcement, had worked out how to properly display bilingual tweets which already had both right to left and left to right format.