Globalizing TwitterThis little bird flies a long way

http://twitpic.com/1m5ou4 – @Astro_Soichi

Feedback

• Reply to me on Twitter: @mzsanford• Email me: matt@twitter.com• Or, talk to me afterward.

"It's real, human interaction. It ain't gonna hurt you."

- @mchammer

Agenda

• Twitter’s non-US Popularity• Growth & Localization

– Case Studies: Japan and Chile

• Technical Hurdles• Community Translation

– The Good, The Bad & The In-between.

Twitter’s International Growth

Up, Up, And Away

70% of Twitter users are outside of the US

June 2009 September 2010

Twitter has 150 million registered users and

Case Study: Japan

Localization efforts in progress

Daily Tweeters

Japanese Mobile Follow Me

Mobile in Japan: Galapagos Phones

• New mobile web site specifically for Japan– Localizing our app was difficult and fragile– This is one of the benefits of an open API– Restrictions (for the more technical):

• Emoji support• No cookies, no SSL

• Working with mobile phone carriers for built-in clients that meet user expectations

Case Study: Chile“Twitter is about the triumph of humanity, not the triumph of technology”

– @biz

Twitter Signups in Chile

About Those Sign-ups …

• Almost 100% are using Spanish as their language

• They were not talking about breakfast foods:– URGENTE en Constitución apareció IVAN LARA DE 8 AÑOS QUE ESTÁ

ABANDONADO en esa ciudad...busca parientes en todo Chile favor copiar y pegar

– Urgent. In Constitución an eight-year old boy named Ivan Lara showed up alone. He's looking for his family

Technical HurdlesTranslation isn’t enough.Neither are great feature ideas.It all has to work.

Character Counting“If you base a product on a character count, you better get it right”

— @mzsanford

Don’t count bytes

Don’t count Code Points

味 U+5473

UTF-8: 0xE5 0x91 0xB3 (3 bytes) UTF-16: 0x54 0x73 (2 bytes)1 human character

e é é=+U+0065 U+0301 U+0065

U+0301U+00E9

or

A Few Technical Lessons

• Ruby 1.8 (our programming language) lacks solid international support

• MySQL will not store all Unicode characters– Despite calling it “utf8”– Options: Store text as a ‘blob’, or use some other storage.

• Unicode Security– Ask me about directionality change phishing!

• See: http://bit.ly/locworld-unicode-security

• Many, many more.

Community TranslationWhy we chose it.How we do it.What works.What doesn’t.

Why Community Translation?

• We had no budget– We were, and very much still are, a start-up.

• We are committed to user involvement, even in the features and language we use

• Our users know our tone and both our users and employees are passionate that we keep that– We have a large pool of subject-matter expert translators.

• We had tried traditional translation and it didn’t mesh well with our release cycle– Twitter.com is released several times a day.

What Works Well?

• Inline translation• Multi-level voting• Discussion groups

– For example, the French word for “followers”:• Suiveur – “stalkers”• Mouton – “sheep”• Adepte – “followers”

Just How Well?Translators:

Strings:

Translations:

Average/Translator:

2,600

4,200

520,000

200

What Works Less Well?

• Turn around time (democracy isn’t fast)• Long, difficult strings are often skipped• Inconsistent wording• Sensitive content• Community management

– They are not self-managing

The Compromise

• Like most things, there was a compromise– We have in-house translators to moderate

content, manage the community, and act as user support in each language

– This gives us someone to oversee consistency and handle any sensitive content we might have

• For our core languages we will always employ translators but they can do more with less.

Coming Soon

• Opening up communities in more languages• Opening up more projects to community input

– Twitter for iPhone, Mobile Web, etc.

• Streamline our translation UI and adding more context

• Launching Twitter in more languages– The obvious outward sign of success

• Localizing with more locale-specific features

Before the Q&A…I need to ask a favor.

@ruthHappy 10th Anniversary

Questions?I’m here to help.