Their efforts were not in vain. After a few hours of a sustained barrage, Twitter’s translation desk took notice and promised that support would come in a few months.
kola tunbosun
Of all the enthusiastic Yoruba afficionados in Nigeria and across the diaspora who were driving the campaign, Kola Tubosun (@baroka on Twitter), a linguist and Yoruba scholar stood out. Piqued by a series of tweets he wrote about Yoruba handles that were wasted on Twitter, I reached out to him about to ask if cultural legacies like Yoruba would survive the interaction with evolving mediums of expression and globalisation, or if perhaps like fossils, they would only survive in some digital thesaurus form. His thoughtful response was optimistic of Yoruba’s future prospects.
But this was already January 2013, almost a year after the first Tweet Yoruba day, and Twitter was yet to make good on its promise.
It would eventually take two years, two tweet yoruba days (one more in 2013), and a dedicated core of Yoruba power translators. But the final outcome is its own reward. The localisation staffer they had corresponded with during the campaign notified Kola that Yoruba had been added to Twitter’s translation centre.
Twitter Translation Center - Yoruba
As we speak, Kola and others are working to translate the Twitter’s standard glossary of terms. They are understandably excited. Yoruba will be the only other African language asides Afrikaans (currently in beta) to be supported by the network. It probably helps that Yoruba seems to be relatively popular. It is spoken not just in Nigeria, but across the world by more than 30 million people, and was one of the first African languages to be added to the Google Translate engine. There is even a Yoruba section of Wikipedia, which Jimmy Wales acknowledged to be the fastest growing African language on the website, even if most of the 30,000 pages are authored by bots
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