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Twitter will support Chinese language in the coming weeks, according to a research report published today.

It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

From Summer of Code to core of the open source community, Transifex is a service to watch. Indifex, the company behind the Web-based collaborative translation platform has put up a major upgrade this week The Transifex upgrade adds paid plans for companies, new quality control tools, support for Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android apps.

Transifex started out as a Google Summer of Code project in 2007 by Dimitris Glezos to help make localization easier. From there, the project has grown into a core service for hundreds of open source projects like Django, GNOME, F-Spot, Firefox, Fedora and many others.

Offering your website in multiple languages is becoming increasingly important, but translating your content into another language is no easy task. But for the 2% of the world's websites that run on the open source CMS Drupal, that task just got a little easier today. Acquia, the commercial company that provides support for Drupal has struck a partnership with the collaborative translation company Lingotek which will allow the Drupal community to translate large amounts of their content.

Lingotek can be embedded directly into Drupal through a set of APIs, which will give Drupal community members access to unlimited language translations.

The latest stable release of the Chrome browser today contains a cool new feature: speech input through HTML. This means that you can talk into your computer's microphone, and your recorded audio will be translated to text and typed out for you.

That's great for speech-to-text input in general - for the purposes of dictation and transcription. But as Google demonstrates, there are a number of other ways in which this can be utilized, including in Google Translate.

The text-input box for Google Translate now accepts voice input. Simply speak the word or phrase you'd like translated - no typing necessary. (You can also hear the translation spoken aloud too.)

If you've never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, know three things - the guide is this really cool book that knows everything about the universe, everyone in that universe can communicate with each other, and you're really missing out on a great story. What's that have to do with anything?

Google today added even more languages to Google Translate for Android and it reminded us of how much closer we are getting to a reality where smartphones will break down language barriers in real-time as we wend our way through the world.

The extent to which social media sites like Twitter and Facebook play a role in the recent political uprisings in Tunisa, Egypt, Bahrain and so on continues to be a source of debate. What is more clear, however, is that the major languages of these regions are not well-served by electronic resources that make text analysis of these documents and data possible.

But now computer scientists have developed the first software system that will allow for the processing of documents in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan and one of the five most-spoken languages in the world.

The events in Egypt over the past few weeks have highlighted the important role that Twitter is taking in communicating and coordinating events of global significance. Indeed, over 70% of Twitter users come from outside the United States. And while English has been the service's dominant language, the company does offer Twitter in six other languages: French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

In order to help make Twitter more accessible to this growing global user-base, the company has just announced the Twitter Translation Center, an effort to crowdsource translations so that Twitter can quickly launch in additional languages.

The video (above) looks great, but I tested it on some Spanish text on both my computer screen and printed out on paper with little satisfaction. The translations fly in and out, change constantly, don't make a lot of sense and are very hard to read. A write-up on TechCrunch says that the creators worked on this for more than two years. Perhaps their results have proven better than mine. Perhaps mine would be better in the field. But for now, it's not so good. I've posted a screen capture below and lucky for you, it's not moving all around like the app did.

Twitter has announced two improvements today that mark the expanding global popularity of the microblogging platform. Twitter has added new cities and countries to its Trending Topics locations and has improved the ability to see translations of Tweets within the detail pane.

While Twitter tracks Trending Topics across the site, local trends are in demand as well, and Twitter has added 13 new countries and 6 new cities to the list, with a promise of more locations to come. According to Twitter, these new locations include "some of our fastest growing markets." This brings to 18 the number of countries and to 24 the number of cities. New locations include the Netherlands, India, Chile, Australia, and Singapore.

LinguaSys has launched its TransGen Mobile app today, promising the first multilingual private mobile chat rooms for Android clients. Rather than just a personal translation service, this app will allow groups to participate in real-time chat, even if they speak multiple languages.

The Android app offers private persistent chat rooms of up to 500 users per room. The app also offers a personal translation option when not in a chat room. But as the need to communicate globally is increasingly real-time, it's the ability to chat that makes the app useful.