Petitioning for a Catalan Twitter

Barcelona (ACN).-  More than 1,600 people signed a virtual petition for a Catalan translation of the social networking website, Twitter. Albert Cuesta, a journalist that specialises in technology, started the petition. Cuesta has been working on the initiative for over a year and has finally made headway. 10 days ago, Cuesta met with representatives responsible for the internationalisation of Twitter in the US. According to him, the perspectives of a Catalan Twitter are good. But he also mentioned that Twitter’s priority as of now is to stabilise their capacity. So if the translation is agreed on, it will be carried out by Catalan volunteers.

At the end of last year, Catalan Twitter users began passing around a virtual petition for a Catalan translation of the popular social networking and microblogging website. The initiative was spurred by the release of Italian, Spanish, French and German versions of the website. Many Catalans then began to ask why they could not have a version of Twitter in their language too.

A year has gone by and a Catalan version of Twitter still does not exist. But the initiative may have now taken the next step on the road towards a Catalan Twitter. The creator of the petition, Albert Cuesta (@albertcuesta), was in the US visiting Twitter representatives at their San Francisco office.

Cuesta explained that the proposal is in “very positive” shape. According to him, websites like Twitter have an interest in increasing their capacity and know that offering their services in another language is a good way to achieve this. However, Cuesta also pointed out that “currently the main priority for Twitter is to stabilize their capacity”.

In any case, the journalist assured that Twitter “intends to begin a new series of translations into different languages and Catalan will probably be one of them”.

A very popular cause

The petition is called 'act.y'. The initiative is being promoted by a chain of retweets saying ‘We want Twitter to translate into Catalan too @biz. Sign the petition here: http://act.ly/ns and RT’.

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