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"Thanks to the efforts of 13,000 volunteers worldwide, Twitter\u00A0is now available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, according to a company blog post. Twitter had been working on translating and localizing these right-to-left languages since January 25.\nThese languages posed unique challenges for Twitter. To overcome technical barriers, Twitter's engineering team had to build a new set of special tools to ensure that these tweets, hashtags and numbers would behave as their counterparts in left-to-right languages. \nNot only that, but some of these languages are spoken \u2014 and therefore will be tweeted \u2014 in locations where Twitter is officially blocked.\nTwitter was a recognizable force in the Arab Spring \u2014 but given that there wasn't yet an Arabic interface, most of the users who tweeted from those regions did so in non-native languages. \nAnd Twitter's numerous volunteer translators for these right-to-left languages \u2014from Lebanese teenagers to Egyptian college students to IT professionals in Iran and Pakistan, among others \u2014 live in these areas as well. \"Their efforts speak volumes about the lengths that people will go to make Twitter accessible and understandable for their communities,\" the company said in its blog post.\n\n\nSEE ALSO: Twitter Will Become Available in Right-to-Left Languages This Spring\n\nArabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu join Thai as the only right-to-left languages in Twitter's translation center. Their incorporation means the service is now available in 28 languages.\nWhat do you think of the addition of these languages? Do you think more people from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia will start tweeting? Let us know in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/03/06/twitter-arabic-farsi-hebrew-urdu/>