Serendipity35

The Iranian election protests have brought greater attention to Twitter, Facebook and some other social media sites. Those sites are being used by Iranians to bypass local censorship.

Firsthand reports from the social networking service Twitter were featured in the New York Times and newspapers around the globe. According to Associated Press reports, the White House was monitoring tweets from Iran to the point that the State Department asked Twitter to hold off on a scheduled outage for maintenance so the information would continue to flow.

Google has now added Persian (Farsi) translation to their Google Translate tool.

Facebook has turned on a “beta” version of the site translated into Farsi. Persian is the native language of Iran and Facebook users have been translating the site into Persian, but had not fully completed the work.

Facebook is working with dozens of other languages and is using the crowd-sourced Translation application. The app enables users to suggest and vote on translations. Users have fully translated Facebook into over 60 languages. When a user has their browser set to Persian or another language, Facebook automatically displays the site in that language. If you want to take a look, log in to your Facebook account, select “Settings” link in the upper-right, then "Account Settings" and "the "Language" tab.