How do you make Indian language content more discoverable through Twitter? Going beyond vernacular tweets, Twitter India will soon introduce a preferred language selector that allows you to pick from desi content in 10 tongues.
To begin with, recommended content will be available in Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. So, for instance, if you are tweeting in Kannada, Twitter will recommend you to see relevant Kannada content from Karnataka.
So, why is Twitter taking this plunge? Here’s why, as articulated by Patrick Traughber, Senior Product Manager, Internationalization, who recently spoke to DH: “In India, 99% of Twitter users have their device settings in English, yet only 55% of Tweets are in English indicating that inferred language may not accurately represent a user’s preferred language.”
This is how the new feature will work once it is launched: “Our preferred language selector will enable users to choose the language or languages of their choice when they sign up to the platform, through a timeline prompt. This choice will enable us to suggest Tweets or accounts that are popular in those languages.”
On Twitter’s growing vernacular trend, Twitter India Managing Director, Manish Maheshwari, noted: “We have seen a growing number of Indian users start to Tweet in regional languages over time. We’re excited to work to serve India’s diverse population, making content across Indian languages more discoverable and accessible to people across the country.”
Riding on a high growth trajectory, Twitter has identified vernacular content as a key pillar to sustain it.
“We are working on improving machine translation quality. Recently, we switched to a better model that is 70% better,” informed Traughber.
Also on the Twitter agenda is the translation of profile and Moments. “We want to make all these seamless for those tweeting in the vernacular.”
User research had shown that the IPL season generated 27 million tweets in 2018, a 44% growth over the year before. The India-Pakistan World Cup Cricket match had 2.9 million tweets while the Lok Sabha elections this year saw a whopping 396 million tweets, a 600% growth from 2014.
To make its mobile app load faster in areas with low internet coverage, Twitter launched a Lite version in 2017.