Twitter breaks geographical boundaries by rolling out its latest version in four right-to-left languages! The social site is now available in Urdu, Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi. Twitter has been working on these versions since 25th January this year with the help of approximately thirteen thousand volunteers from across the world.
Twitter, on its blog specially thanked these volunteers, most of who are from the regions where ‘Twitter is officially blocked’. Many linguistic professionals, IT engineers and bloggers from countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Iran have been involved in accomplishing this feat. The official Twitter blog reads “Their efforts speak volumes about the lengths people will go to make Twitter accessible and understandable for their communities.”
The main challenge for Twitter engineers and designers while designing the site was the right-to-left tweeting structure. It was a ‘unique challenge’ for them, and they’ve incorporated some new tools on the site for this purpose. Twitter is now officially available in 28 different languages of the world and hopes to make it available in many more with the help of its users! More on this in a recent article by BBC.