Just 6 weeks after Twitter came out with a new version for "right-to-left languages," the micro-blogging site has now added language support for Hebrew, as well as for Arabic, Farsi and Urdu. Twitter currently has around 500 million users, and offers its services in 28 different languages. Tweeting was already possible in Hebrew, but now Hebrew menus have been added.
In contrast with Facebook, which identified the potential of Hebrew early on, it took Twitter some years to translate its services. One of the most amusing translations on Twitter was for the word, "Retweet," which allows an existing tweet to be re-sent. The word was translated into Hebrew as, "User X tweeted you again".
The most senior Israeli executive at Twitter, director of engineering Ori Allon, told "Globes" today, "We want to bring Twitter to every single person in the world, and Hebrew speakers are of course an important part of this plan. Today's launching is another step on the way to making Twitter a truly global company."
150% jump in Hebrew usage
French consulting company, Semiocast, published a study showing that Hebrew usage on Twitter grew 150% between 2010 and 2011. However, from a quantitative perspective, Hebrew is still not widely used. As of October 2011, 32,000 public tweets were sent daily in Hebrew, making up 0.1% of all public tweets. Twitter explained that this number is low because many Israelis prefer to tweet in English.
Now that it is officially available in Hebrew, Twitter will face the real test of whether Israeli surfers, among whom the service has not been extremely popular, will choose to use Twitter. Tweeting is currently being used mainly by techies. It will be interesting to wait and see if the threshold will be crossed and all types of Internet users will join the social revolution that Twitter offers.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 7, 2012
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2012