When CSA visited Twitter in San Francisco earlier this year, the international team was hard at work on several languages, supported by crowdsourced translation communities. Their efforts will once again bear fruit over the next week or so as the company releases localized versions of Twitter in Chinese (Simplified and Chinese), Hindi, Filipino (Tagalog), and Malay, bringing its language count to 17. Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish round out the group.

According to Laura Gómez, Manager of Internationalization and Localization at Twitter, the company launched the Translation Center earlier this year to enhance the experience of its users around the world. Says Gómez, “We look forward to adding more languages that our users have asked for, making it easier for everyone, everywhere to get the most out of Twitter.”

However, the current list doesn’t exactly follow the pattern of languages usually released by more traditional business software firms. Rather than rolling out more European languages, social media companies such asFacebook, HootSuite, and Twitter are selecting languages by following their larger user communities. Why? One of the top reasons has to do with the shift in the world’s online wallet toward Asia. Twitter’s localized versions are now available in 12 of the top 15 languages that address up to 80% of most website visitors. Arabic is the lone language with a significant number of speakers in this group that is missing from Twitter’s list. CSA predicts that it will be coming soon.

For buyers of language services who are already present in the markets represented by Twitter’s newest languages or who are preparing for entry, this means a new vehicle for more personal engagement with local prospects and customers. Now is the time to work with your language service providers (LSPs) to integrate these new languages into your multilingual social media and search strategies. And if you don’t have such strategies, by all means, move them up near the top of your priority list this budgeting season.

For LSPs, these languages provide new channels to reach local talent, as well as new customers through sharpening your active listening skills in these markets. This includes ensuring that your clients have acquired the most important social media pages in their names in these countries, as well as fine-tuning or transcreating the right message for each audience.

CSA expects to see Twitter continue on its multilingual flight path, backed up by its translation communities. With more than 70% of its users already outside of the U.S., and its ambitious goal to be on at least two billion devices, Twitter obviously needs to speak – or tweet – the human languages that power those devices as quickly as possible. You need to be ready when they are.

See: Common Sense Advisory