There is little doubt that the further we get into the 21st century, the bigger social media networks are getting. While the American market is thoroughly tapped there are plenty of other markets out there that social networking sites are just starting to reach. It isn’t just social networking that is trying its best to branch out to other cultures than English speaking ones. 

Netflix just recently launched their service in Latin America. Still because of their inherit communication capabilities, social networking sites are leading the charge. Twitter (News - Alert) is now joining this pursuit with the announcement that they are offering the service in five new languages.

Currently Twitter is available in 12 languages, but the company announced that they are taking the necessary steps to add five additional languages to their repertoire. Those languages are Simplified as well as Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Tagalog and Malay. This may be a direct answer to Facebook (News - Alert) taking better aim at more languages itself. 

Facebook has added a translate button that allows people to understand pages that were actually written in other languages. Twitter of course isn’t offering the ability to translate from Tagalog to English instantly the way Facebook is. Twitter is just offering the ability to use the site to more people.

As usual, Twitter is taking on this endeavor thanks in large part to volunteers. Twitter has set up a translation center that will allow those who wish to pitch in. Twitter is also apparently not stopping with 17 languages. While they are not set up to launch in any new languages any time soon there will be another six languages added in the near future. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish and Hungarian will eventually be added. 

Considering the vast number of different languages that are out there in the world, getting them all will be a near impossible task. Still, if there is one network of sites that can eventually accomplish this it will be social networking sites. 

How long it takes for Twitter and Facebook to actually get that many languages loaded into their respective databases is anybody’s guess.