Twitter's web site, long a bastion of English-only, has begun offering translations into Spanish.

According to CNET News.com's the social blogger Caroline McCarthy:

It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site... A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.

I'm amazed it took Twitter this long, though, to be honest, I wasn't even aware that the Twitter.com site had been English-only (with the exception of a stand-alone Twitter Japan site launched in April 2008). I mostly use Tweetdeck, which offers translations in 42 languages other than English, and has allowed me to build a real fan base in Estonia and Andorra.

As McCarthy notes and as WebNewser previously has reported, Facebook grew significantly after it began offering versions of its site in other languages. As of about five weeks ago, Facebook was available in nearly 70 languages.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone explains the new Spanish translation feature in this blog post which, appropriately, is written in Spanish.

Users can access the translation feature by using the little toggle switch on the bottom right of the Twitter banner (screen shot below), which also includes the Japanese version mentioned above.