Twitter is an increasingly global company, with users in Japan, Brazil, Russia and France all just as eager to send 140 character messages as users in North America.

That’s why the company has announced the addition of 16 more languages to its Translation Center, the largest single batch of new languages to date.

Twitter’s Translation Center was launched in February 2011. The goal is to get Twitter users to work together to translate Twitter.com, Twitter’s mobile site and its official apps into the supported languages.

At the time of its launch, Twitter was available in seven languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish), and users who spoke Indonesian, Russian and Turkish were encouraged to sign up for the Center and start translating.

By August 2012, Twitter had been translated into 33 different languages.

The latest additions to the Translation Center – all of which still need volunteers to work on them – include:

• Irish
• Tamil
• Galician
• Welsh
• Serbian
• Bulgarian
• Kurdish
• Vietnamese
• Croatian
• Romanian
• Latvian
• Kannada
• Belarusian
• Bengali
• Albanian
• Slovak

Once these languages are complete, Twitter will be available in 49 languages.

According to an infographic from June 2012, Facebook had support for 70 languages, Google+ supported 60 and LinkedIn supported 17 – so Twitter’s soon-to-be 49 is a very respectable figure in the global phenomenon that is social media.

(Languages keyboard image via Shutterstock)