Translation Of Tweets To Other Languages Spotted On Twitter

singularityhub.com

9 points·kkleiner··8 comments

I actually implemented something similar just for fun(http://twitpic.com/xcwtb). But didn't release it because i never thought anybody would actually use that. It's very unlikely that someone is going to follow a person who is tweeting in a language they don't understand.

Us non-English Europeans follow and tweet in both English and our native tongue fairly often. Then there's Belgium that has three official languages and Finland where a small minority speaks Swedish (as opposed to Finnish). So I wouldn't be so sure about that.

I do this for http://www.bikechatter.com and it's actually quite useful. There are plenty of pro bike racers who write in their own language, and it's nice to be able to get the gist of what they're saying.

This is not new.

The option only appears when there are foreign language tweets on the page. I've used in numerous times in the last few months (and probably before). My guess is that it has been there since before Twitter acquired summize.

Correct; I've been using this feature for at least 6 months.

Not to be self-promoting, but I implemented this on tagdef.com a while back. Also using the Google translate api, it detects if a definition is non-English, and gives the user the possibility to translate. E.g one of the definitions for #lol at http://tagdef.com/lol

As an aside, on this site, we don't view self-promotion as a bad thing, as long as it's not somehow obnoxious. If you've worked hard and built something cool, you should be proud of it.

I'm glad to see the recent expansion of translation efforts from Google. Franz Och and the team are doing a kick ass job!

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