Mabuhay! Twitter in Filipino coming soon

In a move seen as an aggressive expansion to more international markets to increase its user base worldwide, popular social networking site Twitter confirmed that it will be offering Filipino translation for the service soon. In a blog post announcing the launch of two new 100-percent crowdsourced languages on the site—Dutch and Indonesian, upping the total number of full translations to eleven languages—Twitter said they are looking to include Filipino and Malay to the list of supported languages next. "Mabuhay! Mengalu-alukan! We are happy to announce that Twitter Translation Center is now available for Filipino and Malay," Twitter announced in a tweet. The microblogging service also noted how translations for the two new languages were the fastest to be completed to date, aided by its stable pool of some 200,000 volunteer translators. "From the first calls for community involvement to today’s launch, the localization process for Dutch and Indonesian took just one month. We will be using this new process to translate Twitter into many more languages soon," the company said. Users interested to help in the localization of the service would only have to visit the newly opened Translation Center to volunteer, it added. Business magazine Forbes noted in January that Twitter had reached nearly 200 million registered accounts, but is easily dwarfed by chief competitor Facebook's more than 750 million users. The same report noted that the company is now focused on building out its international presence, with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams even visiting South Korea to touch base with users and partners there. "Twitter’s already in Japanese, and popular in that country. Adding another highly networked country like South Korea will be good for the service, especially as a potential test bed for new features or usage patterns," the report added. Aside from the recently launched languages, Twitter can also be viewed in Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, French, Russian, German, Japanese and English. — RSJ, GMA News