While the majority of Twitter users reside within the United States, there is also a massive international population of users sharing info and links in various languages around the world. Tweetmeme, a service for sharing and tracking links on Twitter, announced today that it serves a half of a billion retweet button impressions each day on nearly 200,000 websites worldwide. To keep up with this growth, and the international Twitter community, the service is rolling out support for languages on buttons as well as automatic translation for retweets made on its site.
The buttons now support seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese. For international users, the words “tweets” and “retweet” have been translated into these various languages, making the process of retweeting links via Tweetmeme more accessible. According to a blog post today, the service will include more languages in the future, and it plans to leverage its community of international users to help them do so.
Additionally, using Google Translate, Tweetmeme will now automatically translate tweets users wish to share in their native language. “This automatically detects if translation is required and prompts you when it has made the change, it is a simple one-click to revert the translation if that is not what you desire,” said Tweetmeme in a blog post today.
It’s encouraging to see language support reaching more third-party services as the international Twitter community grows. Personally I am still waiting for the popular desktop and mobile applications to begin automatically translating tweets from users I follow who tweet in multiple languages. This, of course, is challenging due to the shorthand slang that Twitter’s character limit produces, but it would be an invaluable feature to users like myself who happen to follow people who often tweet in a language other than my own.
