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Twitter has started a translation service to help those watching the unfolding political changes in Egypt.
The social networking site has started to translate the Arabic tweets of some leading Egyptians into the local languages of those reading them.
According to a Twitter statement, it was trialling Microsoft’s Bing translation services so that a tweet appears in its original language with the translated text below.
A full list of the Twitter feeds it is translating is available here.
Twitter is not the only social media site offering a translation service: Facebook also offers a translate feature on its website. Google offers a translation service as well through its search engine. With all of these services, it will be easier for bloggers to reach a wider audience and news can be live, without the filters of the media.
Twitter is becoming a source of unfiltered news even if agency news wires are still generally faster when it comes to reliable breaking news. It is hoped that these services, on Twitter and others, will go some way to allowing local news to come from local sources and give a perspective that might otherwise be lost.