Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story where Walt Mossberg sat down with Jack Dorsey to talk about Twitter expanding to China.  In short, it’s not happening anytime soon because the company simply isn’t allowed to set up shop there (quite literally), but that’s not stopping Twitter from undertaking a large localization project that has already seen some users getting the ability to translate tweets. 

Former head engineer of i18n (that’s “International and Localization”) Matt Sanford was employed to work on this project.  The current system uses machines, specifically Google and Bing Translate, to preview and translate a user’s tweet in the “details pane” of the Twitter UI.  The translation is done client side, meaning there is no sharing of translations and each translation is the same as the one before it. 

In the future, Twitter hopes to translate tweets in real time!  If you’re interested in helping out, check out their translation page and get involved!

What about Facebook users?

You could do what I do and take the posts you see in other languages to your translation site of choice, or you could go the road less travelled.  Grease Monkey is a script that allows you to alter the way a page behaves based on bits of Javascript you create.  There is a script floating around from Vaughn Chandler called FFixer that offers localization among other features. 

Facebook is also equipped with the ability to translate into several different languages if you adjust your account settings.

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