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.

However, there are other countries where the Chinese language is used in microblogging. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong come to mind. But even taken all together they don't amount to the estimated 485 million Internet and mobile Web users in China.

Twitter has had some success with its Translation Center, with 200,000+ translators across all languages. It's hard to beat inherent scale, though.

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

For example, you might opt to have professional translation for certain kinds of material such as official publications. But other content, such as a wiki for example, can be translated by your website's community, giving you colloquial and subject matter accuracy but for lower cost. This way, community members not only contribute translations but also rate the precision of translations as well.

By combining machine translation with crowdsourced and professional translations, Drupal users will be able to produce near real-time translations while reducing the costs often associated with translation efforts.

So by partnering with Lingotek to give Drupal customers access to this reliable and rapid content translation, Acquia will enable site owners to expand the reach of their communities globally.

"Internationalization and localization have long been priorities for the Drupal community," says Dries Buytaert, Acquia co-founder and Drupal project founder. "Lingotek's translation technology helps Drupal site owners deliver multi-lingual site experiences and engage members of a Drupal community site to participate in the translation effort."

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.)

This new feature has been in the beta version of Chrome since late March. Thanks to the HTML speech input API, developers can add this ability to their Web apps.

In the future, when you see that little microphone on a website, it means that this functionality is in place. Time to brush up on your elocution and give your keyboarding skills a rest.

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.

Today, the company that wants to index all the world's knowledge added three more languages - Japanese, Arabic and Korean - to the list of 15 languages that it now offers text-to-speech support for on Android phones. This means, you can directly input text in your language, choose the language to translate it to, and then have the phone say it for you. Of course, you could use it to help learn too, but that's not nearly as interesting as the ability to wander the world and let your phone do the talking. (Have you ever tried to ask "Where's the subway?" in Mandarin? I'm willing to bet that anyone, including my Android phone, could pronounce Mandarin words better than I can.)

We thought we would offer a brief smattering of everything Google has done in the past year in terms of rebuilding that Tower of Babel and helping us all communicate a little bit better.

• Google Rebuilds the Tower of Babel with Real-Time Language Translation
• Latest Version of Google Chrome Adds Auto-Translation
• Google Goggles Gets Translation
• Google Translate Now Speaks More Than 30 Languages
• Google Translate & Wikipedia: 16 Million Words Later
• New Google Chrome Extension Will Translate Your Tweets and Facebook Updates
• Google Docs Adds Translation for 53 Languages
• For All Your Dead Language Translation Needs: Google Translate Adds Latin
• Amazing Instant Translation App Looks Great in Video

What other advances has Google made in the last year in its effort to finally dissolve the language barrier? If we've left anything out, help us - and everyone else - recall in the comments below.

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 work is a joint project between her department and Janya, an Amherst-based company she founded that provides information extraction technology in multiple languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Pashto, and Russian.

Natural Language Processing and Urdu

The problem with data mining and sentiment analysis in other languages is that they don't often have the same sort of "established electronic infrastructures" that we have for English and European languages. "If you are trying to do sentiment analysis - to find out what are the main topics people are talking about in a country, is there intensity building up over something and who is swaying opinion - then you must have an information extraction system," Srihari says.

That is what she has been working on with researchers, something that can perform word segmentation (tagging parts of speech, for example) and entity-tagging (recognizing people, place, and organization names) in a raw, untranslated Urdu document.

"Voice of the Citizen" Through Social Media Data Mining

Srihari says she's focused on the "voice of the citizen" in this project. "Some of the information is political and some of it is not," she says, and despite the turmoil in the region, a lot of the social media chatter in Pakistan is about cricket.

Srihari presented her findings at a recent conference - "Blogs & Bullets: Social Media and the Struggle for Political Change" - at Stanford Universitiy. She says she became interested in Urdu because they were looking at blogs from different cultures. Noting that the advent of the Web has caused an explosion in online content in a variety of languages, Srihari says, "When you start looking at blogs in different cultures, you can really start to understand public sentiment and opinions."

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.

New languages added to the Translation Center, in addition to those already offered, include Indonesian, Russian and Turkish. Those are the languages into which Twitter will be translated next, and the company says there are more to come.

Crowdsourced Translations

Crowdsourcing translations isn't new. Facebook is now available in over 70 languages, for example, thanks in part to the efforts of over 300,000 users who helped translate the site. And Twitter says it's been using volunteer translators since October 2009.

Crowdsourcing translation works by taking a word or phrase - such as "hashtag" or "Privacy Policy" - and asking for input and feedback on translations. The community then agrees on the best possible translation. You can sign up to help translate Twitter - its mobile and websites, its apps, its help and business centers.

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.

If it worked better, this would be awesome and well worth $5. Remember kids, when traveling the world, do not oxidant or cough the animals.

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.

Currently, this feature is available to a "very small percentage of users" but will be rolled out to everyone in the coming weeks.

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.

LinguaSys is a machine translation company and the new app uses the company's technology to "provide higher accuracy and produce superior comprehension in the translation of complex corporate short-life communications including text chat, e-mail, web pages and documents." Initially designed as a translation tool for the military, the Android app brings this tech to the international business community.

But as machine translation can be notoriously mediocre, the pressure will be on this app to not just provide quality translation, but to do so in real-time.

Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.

Of course, Google Translate's ability is limited, and it seems to extract less meaning when the sentences are short.

A tweet from one of the top users in Beijing translated from Chinese to English using Social Translate.

Social Translate is a useful and relevant idea for a web that is increasingly composed of conversations. The extension has some shortcomings and a few bugs, judging by a quick test and its page on Google Code.

It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably (except for the fact that Google Translate often turns up total nonsense), letting users skip the Google Translate prompt that appears when you navigate to a site in a foreign language. If your first language is English but you're also fluent in Spanish, you can tell Social Translate to display Spanish tweets but translate any other language to English.

On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.

It appears the two developers, Andrew Swerdlow and Nav Jagpal, are still working out the kinks with this extension. I could not get the extension to work for MySpace or Google Buzz, although the developers intend for it to work for those services.

Update: Just got an email from Swerdlow, who says they are testing a build that works with Buzz and hope to ramp up on some of the other big sites over the next few months. If you download Social Translate, you can test it by going to Swerdlow's multilingual Twitter page, http://twitter.com/AndroidX.

The search engine touted its efforts last week at Wikimania 2010, claiming that its translation tools have been used to translate "more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide".

Nonetheless, Google says that it is "off to a good start but, as you can see [...] we have a lot more work to do to bring the information in Wikipedia to people worldwide".

The Translator Toolkit, unlike Google Translate, assists in translating content in a number of ways, rather than simply offering a machine translation and leaving it at that. The service, which is designed to pull Wikipedia's pages directly, not only offers a translation, but offers help with translating difficult phrases and words. It also shows how other translations have occurred across the Web and, in a very Wikipedian fashion, share translations with others to view and edit.

The use of Google's Translator Toolkit shows the company's continuing efforts in the realm of translation. Google has been busy lately, with automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and software to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.

Additionally, using Google Translate, Tweetmeme will now automatically translate tweets users wish to share in their native language. "This automatically detects if translation is required and prompts you when it has made the change, it is a simple one-click to revert the translation if that is not what you desire," said Tweetmeme in a blog post today.

It's encouraging to see language support reaching more third-party services as the international Twitter community grows. Personally I am still waiting for the popular desktop and mobile applications to begin automatically translating tweets from users I follow who tweet in multiple languages. This, of course, is challenging due to the shorthand slang that Twitter's character limit produces, but it would be an invaluable feature to users like myself who happen to follow people who often tweet in a language other than my own.

The feature uses the open-source speech synthesizer eSpeak to turn text into sound, giving Google Translate users the ability to hear how the words they're seeing are supposed to be pronounced.

Google first introduced its "text-to-speech" feature in November 2009, adding support for Hatian, Creole, French, Italian and German in recent months.

Today's announcement adds text-to-speech functionality for for Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.

As we noted last week when looking at the addition of translation using text recognition to Google Goggles, Google has been busy lately with numerous advances in the realm of translation. The company has announced automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and software to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.

Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don't need it for.

One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google's servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.

Better Privacy Controls

In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new "Content Settings" option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.

What About the Mac and Linux?

With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn't easy. While these new features aren't available for Mac and Linux users yet, it's likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.

However, as their translation team now comprises just five staffers, Twitter is asking users to suggest translations for the website. "We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," wrote co-founder Biz Stone on the company blog. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster, and we'll have enough material to respond."

We've long been interested in Yahoo! Meme, which built its user base by launching in Portuguese only, then expanding to Spanish and, more recently, English. Some of these sites are more obviously direct rip-offs of Twitter, such as the Spanish Birddi. In fact, the Twitter fan wiki lists 28 foreign-language Twitter clones and links to this exhaustive list of more than 200 microblogging sites around the world.

Some of these sites have stronger, more established communities than others. Some of the URLs have been sold, and we're sure that some will be shut down for obvious trademark infringement or other legal reasons as Twitter expands its reach globally. Still, a few will remain in each market as viable competitors (and possible acquisitions).

Another thought we've had is that this will bring Twitter into the same arena as MySpace, Facebook and other larger properties in terms of having a large enough base of users to justify its valuation and ensure its continued success. Sure, Twitter is the tech scene's darling, and MySpace is an ironic bit of ancient history to hardcore geeks. But MySpace still controls a large share of many international markets and, perhaps for that reason alone, still gets enough eyeballs to remain competitive.

According to a Compete.com report earlier this year, Twitter saw around 6 million unique visitors in January of this year, making it the third largest social website on the Internet. MySpace had about ten times as many visitors. Facebook, which made translated versions of its site a priority some time ago, saw 68 million unique visitors.

And if you've ever doubted whether Facebook and Twitter are competitors, take a look at this Inside Facebook report on that network's international growth, which has surged to the point that Facebook's international users make up a full 70% of the site's users. Will those accustomed to using Facebook status updates as their microblogging platform of choice see the point of adopting Twitter?

Is an international scope, starting with FIGS translations, going to take Twitter over the top and make it a major-league player in social networking worldwide? And how will it deal with robust microblogging competition in international markets? Let us know what you think in the comments.