Asiajin

On the twitter Japanese localization news, newly-opened Twitter Japan development blog explains what items are on their task list on localization process.

In their current plan,

• They are making Japanese version on top of current (running) system.
• Japanese users and world users belong to the same account space.
• They do NOT make another Japanese version of twitter only with newcoming Japanese users.
• There are NO filtered public timeline only with Japanese messages/users. Japanese users will see English messages, vise versa.
• Both Japanese and original users/messages/following/followers/favorites are shown in mixed
• Menu/Help/etc. will be translated. Translated Japanese will be available triggered by menu, or by accessing different URL

Also, they mentioned cellular phone browser improvement plan in other entry.

As far as I read them, what they are planning is only adding text localization feature to the original twitter, which should not be a lot of work, since Twitter is made by Ruby on Rails and Rails has built-in localization support. It is possible that continuous performance tuning on Twitter may remove the localization related codes and recovering them more difficult though.

Author Information  Akky Akimoto is one of the first pro-bloggers [J] in Japan. As an individual he writes for Asiajin and his own Japanese weblog. He also produces web services including IvRead.com and Narabe.com. Twitter @akky

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