Twitter plans French, German, Italian and Spanish sites

Twitter, the fast-growing micro-blogging service, is seeking volunteer French, German, Italian, and Spanish translators to render its website into other languages.

Twitter's website, Twitter.com, is currently only offered in English or Japanese.

Biz Stone, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based startup, said in a blog post on Friday that Twitter was planning versions of its website in other languages, starting with French, German, Italian and Spanish.

He invited a "small group" of Twitter users to become "volunteer translators" to suggest translations for the Twitter website.

"We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well," he said.

"We're very excited that more people will be able to use Twitter in their native language!" he added.

Twitter, which allows users to pepper one another with 140-character-or-less messages known as "tweets," has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006 and claims to have topped 50 million users.

(c) 2009 AFP