When browsing in Twitter, I got to know this amazing tool for Iphone named “PicTranslator”.  PicTranslator is an Iphone application which turns your Iphone into a translator. The strength of this application is the use of the camera to translate. You just need to take a picture of what you want to translate (a sign, a menu, etc…) and the application give you back the picture in your own language.  For some languages,  the application can also spell the words, in order to help you to say them (if you need to order in a restaurant as in the introduction video).

You can get a good overview in the introduction video where we can see a concrete example of the use.

This is the kind of Iphone application which makes interesting the Iphone for people travelling a lot or living abroad, and this for less than $1 in the App Store.

The next November 16^th 2009 could be an important date in Internet history. At  least in terms of internationalization of Internet.

Let’s start first with this acronym ‘IDNs’ for Internationalized domain names, they already exist, but not for the full domain, the last part of the domains still remain in Latin scripts. Today they are available for main global extensions as the .com .biz etc… The Korean version of Starbucks website is also available on 스타벅스코리아.com.  They are also available for local versions with for example the Spanish accent if you book a .es

After the November 16th we will be able to book complete internationalized domain names which will allow Web addresses in Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi , Cyrillic, Chinese and others.

So Chinese websites will be able to use .中国 domain names for instance.

“This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts” said Rod Beckstrom. Despite what said the President of the ICANN, it can not be as big of a deal as it’s supposed to be.

I am quite sure that in China it will be a good success since a lot of people don’t have any knowledge of western languages contrary to Israel or India.

But anyway, we can think the most part of the website will still keep with the latin scripts for their domains name, because:

- People have their habits now, in France we are able to use domain names with our accents like é, but I don’t know any website which uses that.

- The IDNs have usually a lot of trouble to work with emails

- There is no way to have an idea to internationalize your website if you already are “so” local, because one problem which is still not resolved is how people in countries that use the Latin script will be able to access Web sites with some of the Non-Latin script domain names.

- if half of mankind use non-Latin scripts, most of them use Latin keyboards

So  this should be just a new way to localize a website for country like China and Arabic or Russian speaking countries. Therefor it is especially good if the target of the website is to reach people who are not familiar with latin scripts which makes kind of a broad audience in some coutries like the older generations for instance.

Anyway the future will tell us, after seen the success, how to consider this new localization trend.

Last week Twitter announced that more languages will come soon on their website.  Twitter is now only in English and Japanese (due to the huge success in Japan since the beginning).

The next step will be 4 languages more, the usual FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish).   We can still wonder why wait that much time, it doesn’t seem to be that hard to translate a website, especially Twitter since there is not that much text.  They maybe wanted to stay focused on the early users and now I guess they realise that their tool start to reach everybody. I can see that in France, lot of (non-tech news) websites have now  a twitter account as for example the famous sports news papers L’Equipe, Le Monde, etc…

It also should be the starting point to add much more languages soon, as Facebook did quickly after the French and Spanish version.

The way to translate, will be the same as Facebook used, it means the community (now reserved to few users) will translate and vote for the best translation.  It’s empowering the idea of a community with average knowledge on a subject is better than  an expert’s. This is debatable.

After even if it’s simple, lot of people don’t get the point of Twitter, so by launching in other languages, Twitter should reach more people who heard about Twitter, but don’t really know how it works.

So now let’s see how these translations will work and especially the impact on the non-English speaking audience.

You can get to know more about the Twitter translation programme in this video: