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Tag: languages

  • AdSense Gains Support For Language Spoken By Millions

    Google announced on Monday that it has just added Filipino to its list of supported languages for AdSense.

    This is spoken by millions of people in the Philippines and around the world, so it’s a little surprising it wasn’t already supported, but better late than never. Here’s a look at the languages currently supported:

    Screen Shot 2016-04-11 at 12.06.34 PM

    Those with an “*” are only supported for ad serving. The product interface and help center are not supported for these.

    “To start monetizing your Filipino content website with Google AdSense,” Google says. “Check the AdSense program policies and make sure your website is compliant.Sign up for an AdSense account, [and] add the AdSense code to start displaying relevant ads to your users.”

    Image via Google

  • LinkedIn Publishing Platform Makes Global Push

    LinkedIn Publishing Platform Makes Global Push

    LinkedIn just announced that its publishing platform is going global with localized languages. It’s only been available in English until now, but today it’s becoming available in Portuguese. In the coming months, it will add more and more languages. German and French are next up on the list.

    As it expands into more languages, it will also feature Influencers in each one. That starts with nearly two dozen in Portuguese right away.

    “Over the past few weeks we’ve given early access to some of our members in Brazil, and we’re already seeing thousands of high-quality posts making their way onto LinkedIn,” says LinkedIn’s Angela Yang. “With nearly 22 million members in Brazil, the potential to reach a new audience, be discovered by like-minded professionals and expand the professional reach is tremendous. From building relationships and establishing themselves as experts, to landing new opportunities and growing their businesses — the benefits that LinkedIn members are experiencing make us even more excited to bring these tools to all of our members, around the globe.”

    “As professionals, we all have our own perspective on the world around us, but until recently, we didn’t always have the right platform to share it on,” she says. “That’s why it came as no surprise that when we made it possible for all English speaking members to publish long-form posts on LinkedIn, it quickly became one of the fastest growing features on the site. Today, LinkedIn has become known as the definitive professional publishing platform around the world.”

    Last month, LinkedIn announced that over a million people had published a post using the platform. They first opened it up to everyone in February of last year. The company says over a million unique publishers publish over 130,000 posts a week, and about 45% of readers are in the upper ranks of their industries, such as managers, VPs, and CEOs. The average post now reaches professionals in 21 industries and 9 countries, it says.

    In June, LinkedIn launched a new version of its Pulse news reader app, which makes use of the user’s LinkedIn network when determining what content to show them.

    Meanwhile, marketers are increasing their focus on LinkedIn. A recent study from Social Media Examiner asked marketers to select one social platform as the most important. 21% selected LinkedIn, second only to Facebook. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn beats out Facebook based on other studies.

    Image via LinkedIn

  • Google Expands App Indexing Into More Languages

    Google launched app indexing globally in English a couple months back after testing it since November. Now, they’re expanding it into more languages.

    The feature enables Google to deliver in-app content in search results on mobile devices (specifically Android devices for now). For example, if you search for “Dee Barnes,” you might get a result from Wikipedia. With app indexing, Google will give you the option to open the app from the result as opposed to going to a mobile web version.

    The feature requires app developers to be on board, so Google has announced specific publishers with content in different languages that are now taking advantage of app indexing. These include: Fairfax Domain, MercadoLibre, Letras.Mus.br, Vagalume, Idealo, L’Equipe, Player.fm, Upcoming, Au Feminin, Marmiton, and chip.de.

    Google has also translated its developer guidelines into eight more languages (Chinese – traditional, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish), so that should help too.

    Google has a form here where you can request to participate in App Indexing. The company notes that it has added a few new apps in the U.S., including Walmart, Tapatalk, and Fancy.

    Google promises a session for developers at Google I/O dedicated to “the future of apps and search”.

    Internet giants like Google and Facebook are working to make mobile apps more web-like. At Facebook’s recent developer conference, the company announced App Links, which enable apps to link to content within other apps.

    Image via Google

  • Pinterest Keeps Expanding with Launch in Indonesia

    Pinterest Keeps Expanding with Launch in Indonesia

    Pinterest has just announced that the site is now accessible in Indonesian. That means that the site is now available in almost two dozen languages.

    Just a week ago, Pinterest launched in Korean.

    With those recent languages expansions, users can now roam Pinterest in 22 different languages and dialects, including a couple regional varieties of English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

    With ads ramping up and expansion on the mind, Pinterest is making the site more accessible to more people. The company may even get into the travel business, so to say. The island chain of Indonesia (as a whole) has about 250 million people.

    So go ahead, pin those gado-gado recipes.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Google Translate Hits 80 Languages Milestone, Adds 9 New Ones

    Google Translate has hit the 80 languages milestone, as Google announced the addition of support for nine more languages.

    “Whether you’re trekking to a new place or simply trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t share a language with you, Google Translate can help you connect to new information and people,” says software engineer Arne Mauser. “Today, we’re launching 9 new languages that span Africa, Asia, and Oceania and have over 200 million native speakers, collectively.”

    These languages would be: Hausa (Harshen Hausa), Igbo (Asụsụ Igbo), Yoruba (èdè Yorùbá), Somali (Af-Soomaali), Zulu (isiZulu), Mongolian (Монгол хэл), Nepali (नेपाली), Punjabi language (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ) (Gurmukhi script) and Maori (Te Reo Māori).

    The first three are major languages of Nigeria. Somali is spoken in Somalia as well as other countries around the Horn of Africa, and has 17 million native speakers. Zulu is spoken in South Africa as well as other south-western African countries with 10 million native speakers.

    In Asia, Mongolian is spoken in Mongolia in addition to parts of China, and has 6 million native speakers. Nepali is poken in Nepal as well as India, and has 17 million native speakers. Punjabi is spoken in India and Pakistan, and has 100 million native speakers.

    Maori is spoken in New Zealand with 160 thousand speakers. Support for this language was made possible by a volunteer effort.

    Earlier this year, Google added Bosnian, Cebuano, Hmong, Javanese and Marathi. You can see all supported languages here.

    Image: Google

  • Google Adds Handwriting Support To Gmail, Docs

    Google announced today that it has added handwriting input support to Gmail and Google Docs. You can now input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad.

    First, you’ll need to enable input tools in Gmail or in Docs, and then select the handwriting input (which is shown with a pencil icon) of the language you wish to use.

    Handwriting

    “Handwriting input makes the internet easier to use by people worldwide and is also part of a larger effort to break the barrier between languages,” says Google product manager Xiangye Xiao.

    The feature will let you write single or multiple characters at a time in the panel , so you can see them in your message or document.

    The feature is available for over 20 languages in Google Docs and for over 50 in Gmail.

    Images: Google

  • Pinterest Launches New French-Focused Version with More Local Content

    Pinterest Launches New French-Focused Version with More Local Content

    L’histoire, les arts, la cuisine et la mode…depuis l’année dernière Pinterest a été traduit en Français mais la langue n’est qu’un élément de la vaste culture Française. C’est pourquoi nous lançons en France une nouvelle version localisée de Pinterest, créée spécifiquement pour la communauté Française.

    Pinterest is turning its focus on France. Although Pinterest has been available to the French since last year, the user experience has basically been the same as any other user’s experience in the U.S., U.K., or elsewhere. Today, Pinterest is announcing a new, localized version of the service which will cater to French users.

    French Pinterest users will start to see more local content when they search or browse categories. More pins will link to French sites and they’ll also see more pin descriptions in French.

    “We hope today’s updates will help French pinners discover more relevant pins, and faster than ever before. We’re so excited to offer a tailored experience for our French community and we definitely couldn’t have done it without help from native French pinners,” says Pinterest.

    French users should see the new local focus on the web and on the Pinterest mobile apps.

    Of course, international expansion is key for Pinterest’s continued growth and eventual monetization. Pinterest is available in a few non-English languages – German, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese. But tailoring content to a specific international audience is something new (they did something like this in the U.K. last year) – and something that we may seen Pinterest do more of in the future.

  • Bing To Add Klingon Language To Translator To Market ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’

    Bing To Add Klingon Language To Translator To Market ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’

    Update: Bing has now made the official announcement.

    Bing is reportedly adding the Klingon language to Bing Translator as part of a marketing deal between Microsoft and Paramount, as the studio prepares to release Star Trek Into Darkness.

    While we’ve been unable to bring up the language in Bing Translator so far, The LA Times (via Engadget) reports that it is coming today:

    The Bing service will translate text written in any one of 41 supported languages — including English, French, Hebrew and Urdu — into Klingon. Fear not, native Klingon speakers: words or phrases written in that language can be translated into the more than three dozen available tongues.

    According to the report, Microsoft engineer helped develop the feature, has he apparently speaks Klingon. The LA Times shares a quote from Bing’s Craig Beilinson: “We have people who understand the deep science of linguistics and we also have people who are passionate about the ‘Star Trek’ franchise. This was a labor of love from a lot of different avenues.”

    This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Klingon Language utilized by a major search engine. You can still see the Google Klingon homepage here.

    Star Trek Into Darkness releases in the U.S. on May 17th.

    Image: StarTrek.com

  • Google Launches Knowledge Graph In More Languages

    Google is expanding the Knowledge Graph into more languages, including Italian, French, Japanese, and Russian.

    According to Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, Google Fellow Ben Gomes made the announcement on stage at LeWeb Paris. There is a blog post about it on Google’s Italy blog (in Italian).

    There’s no mention in the post, however, about all the new languages, and Lardinois says there could be more. We’ve reached out to Google for a full list, and will update accordingly.

    Update: Google has put out a post on its Inside Search blog saying that it’s rolling out in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.

    Google Search Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown writes:

    So in Japanese, your search for [白鵬] will bring up the top-ranked sumo wrestler, including his heya and ranks, and help you discover other highly-ranked sumo wrestlers. Or a Russian search for [петр I] will help you research the country’s historic Tzar Peter the Great, and explore connections to his family and other famous rulers. And if you’re a fan of football in Brazil, [corinthians] will show information including that team’s most recent championship wins — all in your language.

    This is more than just translation. The Knowledge Graph needs to account for different meanings of the same word — “football” means something quite different in the U.S. than in Europe. It also needs to recognize what’s most important in a particular region. The graph now covers 570 million entities, 18 billion facts and connections, and about three times as many queries globally as when we first launched it — we’ll keep working on making it more useful for you.

    Last week, Google announced some content expansion of the Knowledge Graph in the U.S. It now includes information about drugs.

    Google has placed a great deal of emphasis on the Knowledge Graph offering since it initially launched earlier this year. It is even the subject of an ad campaign Google launched last month, for its mobile search app.

    Google is likely only getting started in terms of all the information that Knowledge Graph will surface. It will be interesting to see how much it has expanded by this time next year, and in how many countries it is available.

    More Knowledge Graph coverage here.

  • Google Updates WhatBrowser.org; 43 Languages, Mobile Support

    Google says that no matter which browser you choose, you should at least be informed on whether or not it’s updated and what the other options are. Three years ago, they created a site that answers those questions and more.

    Although WhatBrowser.org is a Google creation, they don’t simply recommend that everyone switches to the newest version of Chrome. For instance, accessing WhatBrowser with Firefox will suggest that you can try Chrome, Opera, or Safari. Not IE, it’s important to note.

    For the truly technologically-challenged among us, Google also provides a short description of what a browser actually is. They also let users know that updating your browser, whichever one it may be, is necessary because it’s faster, safer, and more feature-rich.

    With that in mind, Google has made some changes to the site, which they announced in a Chrome blog post.

    “To reflect the changing browser landscape, we’ve completely revamped whatbrowser.org. The site has been fully rebuilt in HTML5, localized in 43 languages, and now works on mobile, too. The site also highlights why it’s so important to use a modern browser and keep it up to date: doing so saves you time, keeps you safer, and lets you do more online. The browser you choose is up to you; hopefully whatbrowser.org can help,” says Google Product Manager Jeff Chang.

    With the internet reaching more and more people across the world every day, searches like “what’s a browser” and “what browser am I using” will continue to see volume. Google’s WhatBrowser.org ranks near the top for many of these types of searches.

    For fun, if you’re interested, you can take a journey through four years of the browser wars here. The visualization takes you from June 2008 to June 2012 – from a world dominated by Internet Explorer to one where Chrome and Firefox take up plenty of real estate.

  • LinkedIn Goes Danish For 3 Million Nordic Region Members

    LinkedIn announced that is has launched a new Danish language version. The company says there are over 3 million members across the Nordic region, including 900,000 in Denmark.

    “Every day, our members are adding information to their profiles, sharing important views and insights, connecting to one another, building their networks and getting access to a world of potential contacts, business partners, investors, employers and employees,” said Lars Ingerslev, commercial manager, LinkedIn, Nordics.

    “Furthermore, with the Danish export sector accounting for half (50 percent) of Denmark’s GDP, the addition of a Danish language version of LinkedIn will not only make it easier for Danish professionals and companies to connect with each other, but also to connect and collaborate with a global network of more than 175 million professionals,” Ingerslev said.

    According to Ingerslev, there are thousands of Danish groups on LinkedIn. In a blog post, he also cites research from a Danish consultancy company indicating that LinkedIn influences 10% of all new hires (up from 3% last year).

  • Google Adds Its 65th Language To Google Translate With Lao

    Google announced today that it has added Lao to its Google Translate repertoire, making it the 65th language the service supports.

    Lao, sometimes called Laotion, is spoken in Laos, Thailand, the U.S., France, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina. In Laos, it is the official language. As of 2006, there were a reported 5.22 million native speakers.

    Google is keeping the “alpha” tag on Lao for the time being, as it’s not quite where the company wants it to be. Google Translate Associate Product Manager Minqi Jiang says in a post on the Google Translate blog:

    The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic translations, both for languages that have been available for some time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter; changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future.

    Support for Lao meets our launch standards, but translation quality is at the lower end compared to that of other languages we offer. We therefore designate Lao with an “alpha” status until we can make further improvements. While our Lao translations will be usable in some situations, like providing an English reader with the gist of an article written in Lao, they will fail in other situations where more precise translations are needed. We need your feedback in order to improve the quality of Lao translations.

    Google is calling upon users to help improve its translation of the language by providing alternate translations (by clicking on words or phrases of the translated sentence) or using the Google Translator Toolkit to upload translations.

    Last month, Google added some new camera functionality to Google Translate for Android, making the service all the more helpful in travel situations. Now, you can take a picture of a sign that is written in an unfamiliar language, and get it translated.

  • LinkedIn Expands Ads Into 17 New Languages

    LinkedIn announced today that it is launching LinkedIn Ads in 17 new languages.

    “LinkedIn Ads now provides a truly local experience and allows you to create ads in the language of your choice,” says LinkedIn’s Gyanda Sachdev. “From Japanese and Czech to French and Turkish, this update makes it that much easier for members to share information and create messages that resonate with other members they want to reach.”

    “For example, the addition of new languages to LinkedIn Ads allows a finance executive in Brazil to use Spanish to connect with clients in Spain, while a tech company in Hong Kong can frame its message in Dutch to pursue customers in Amsterdam,” adds Sachdev.

    LinkedIn ads will now be available in the following languages:

    English
    Czech
    Dutch
    French
    German
    Indonesian
    Italian
    Japanese
    Korean
    Malay
    Norwegian
    Polish
    Portuguese
    Romanian
    Russian
    Spanish
    Swedish
    Turkish

    LinkedIn has 175 million members worldwide. Earlier this month, the company reported an 89% year-over-year increase in revenue. This language expansion should add to the numbers quite nicely.

  • Pinterest Expands Into More Languages

    Pinterest Expands Into More Languages

    Pinterest announced today that it is expanding into a couple of new languages – Dutch and German.

    Pinterest is now available in the following languages:

    Pinterest languages

    “Whatever language you speak, we work hard to make Pinterest a place to plan your dreams and organize all the things that inspire you,” said Pinterest’s Sara Tavel on the company blog.

    “As we expand our languages, we look forward to providing Pinterest to more people,” she added.

    Users can update their language settings by mousing over their name in the top right corner, clicking settings, and selecting languages.

    Continued language expansion will obviously be important for Pinterest’s growth. The company has been making other moves that should also help a great deal. These include making it so you no longer need an invitation to use it, and launching apps for Android, iPhone and iPad.

  • 100 Million New People Can Now Use Google Voice Search

    Google announced this morning that Voice Search for Android is now available in 13 new languages – Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak and Swedish.

    With the addition of these new languages, Google says 100 million new speakers can now use Voice Search. That’s good news for users too, because Google says the more people who use Voice Search, the more accurate it gets.

    “Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges,” says product manager Bertrand Damiba. “While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced.”

    The update will be rolling out over the course of the next week.

    Voice Search is now available in a total of 42 languages, and various accents in 46 countries.

  • Twitter in Basque, Czech, & Greek Now a Reality

    Three more languages have graduated from Twitter’a translation center. Now, Twitter is available in Basque, Czech, and Greek.

    From the Twitter translation center blog:

    Last May, we opened our Translation Center to 6 new languages using a new set of features we’ve created to make the translation process faster. There is more automation and more efficiency in this new system that allows for faster input from the translator community.

    We’d like to thank you, our dedicated translators, who made this launch happen by requesting and supporting Twitter in your language. You are the ones who help us get closer to making Twitter available around the world.

    Back in May, Twitter added Basque, Czech, Greek, Ukrainian, Catalan, and Afrikaans to the Translation center, where volunteers immediately got to work translating the site (site frame, not the tweets). The first two of those languages to launch from the Center were Ukrainian and Catalan, which became available in early July. Not, with the launch of these three new languages, all we are waiting on in Afrikaans from that class.

    Before this, Twitter became available in right-to-left languages Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu.

    The addition of Greek, Czech, and Basque means that Twitter is officially available in 33 different languages.

    [Image via Harald Groven, Flickr]

  • iPhone 5 Could Be Bigger Hit Than Predecessors In China

    As previously reported, Apple’s Q3 earnings reveal that the company is doing pretty well in the Chinese market. Half of the company’s revenue comes from international markets, and China is no doubt high on the list.

    CEO Tim Cook says revenue from the country was $5.7 billion in Q3, accounting for a whopping 48% increase year-over-year. Things may soon get even better for Apple in China, despite increased smartphone competition in the region.

    Siri does not currently support Mandarin Chinese, which is widely spoken in China and in Hong Kong. A report from Reuters reminded us today that this is about to change this fall.

    Update: Wording has been adjusted to reflect that (as a reader pointed out) Mandarin was previously announced as a supported language in iOS 6, which will also come to other versions of the iPhone.

    Currently, Siri works in English (United States, United Kingdom and Australia), French (France), German (Germany), and Japanese (Japan). On Apple’s Siri FAQ page, it says that Siri will support addition languages, including Chinese, Korean, Italian and Spanish, in 2012.

    Siri can be used in any country in the supported languages, but it’s designed to recognize specific accents and dialects of its supported countries. Clearly, Siri has a great deal of room for growth in that department, and given that Siri has become one of Apple’s main selling points for the iPhone, more language support should have a significant impact on iPhone sales, which haven’t been as great as they have been in previous quarters (though Apple still managed to sell 26 million of them in the quarter).

    Of course, Google has added a Siri competitor to its Android operating system, so Apple may also find Siri to become less of a selling point as time goes on.

    The iPhone 5 (if that is its real name) is expected to be released in either September or October, depending on which reports you believe. The aforementioned Reuters report is sticking with October, but otherwise, the latest rumor is leaning more towards September.

  • Google Input Shows The Difficulty Of Translating Across Multiple Languages

    Google Input is a virtual keyboard released by the search engine giant, as an extension for Chrome and app for Android. The app/extension allows users to utilize keyboards as they would be constructed in various regions & languages.

    This video shows how translating words from language to language can be a huge undertaking, as there are words in various cultures which simply don’t translate to others. Below you will see words from Mandarin, Hindi, and Greek.

    This app will certainly be a boon to those who have a business or career that deals with a lot of various international clients and partners. Do you see yourself utilizing Google Input on a frequent basis?

  • Twitter In Catalan, Ukrainian Now A Reality

    Thanks to the diligent volunteers that populate Twitter’s Translation Center, the service is now available in two new languages: Catalan and Ukrainian.

    In all, Twitter (the service, not the actual tweets) has been translated and is ready for use in 30 different languages.

    Twitter launched the Translation Center back in February, 2011, with the goal of crowdsourcing the site’s translation, so that it could be accessible to more countries across the world. When the center launched, Twitter was only available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The launch brought three new languages to the translation block – Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish.

    We worked to ensure the quality, consistency and unified voice of our translators were in our tools – via automation. Today, we are making two of those languages available for all users to see and change their language settings to – Catalan and Ukrainian. The translations you see live on Twitter.com are based on translation completion and community approval. In order to use Twitter in Catalan or Ukrainian, please go to your language settings today.

    Back in May, Twitter added six new languages the Translation Center – Catalan, Afrikaans, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech and Basque. In under two months, two of those languages are now ready for prime time. Twitter reminds users that the more people volunteer to participate in the translation of the other four, the quicker they will become available to all users.

    The last four languages that became available on Twitter were right-to-left languages including Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu.

    [Image Courtesy Liz Castro, Flickr]

  • Duolingo Opens To The Public After 125,000 Users Translated 75 Million Sentences During Beta

    Way back in November of 2011, Duolingo opened up their private beta and was hit with a flood of excitement in the form of invite requests. “People asking me for Duolingo invites: Patience, grasshoppers,” said creator Luis von Ahn.

    For those of you who never got in, or who are just hearing about it for the first time and want to get your language learning on – Duolingo is now open to the public.

    “Duolingo leverages the brain power of millions of people who are currently learning a new language to help translate the web,” says Luis von Ahn, co-founder of Duolingo. “So much of the web is partitioned off by language barriers. With more than a billion people on the planet learning a new language, I knew this was the ultimate opportunity to not only provide accessible education resources, but also make the internet a truly world wide web.”

    And that’s the incredibly simple but brilliant premise of Duolingo. Once you choose the language you’d like to become more proficient in, Duolingo feeds you words and phrases from around the web – based on your skill level.

    Next, you translate those phrases. If you have trouble, Duolingo helps you out a little bit with hints. Your translations go into a giant pool of all user translations, and part of the Duolingo experience is voting on the translations submitted by the community. That way, they most correct translations can rise to the top.

    So, in theory, Duolingo allows people to learn a foreign language while simultaneously crowdsourcing the translation of the interwebs.

    With their public launch, Duolingo says that they already have over 125,000 active users as a result of the private beta. Since November, those users have translated 75 million sentences in english, Spanish, German, and French. Other languages are on the way, they say, including Portuguese and Chinese.

  • Draw Something Now Available In 12 New Languages

    Considering the downward trajectory that Draw Something has seen since being acquired by Zynga, it’s no surprise that the company is attempting to penetrate some new markets and use some star power to ignite a little bit of buzz.

    Today, Zynga announced that the game is now available in twelve new languages including Spanish, German, and Chinese.

    Zynga…today launches Draw Something in 12 new languages, providing even more people the chance to draw and connect with friends worldwide. Languages available starting today include: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Most of the localized versions offer translated user interfaces and dictionaries to enable players to have an enhanced playing experience in their native language. Additionally, the word choices for the Simplified Chinese version have been localized to include English words that are more meaningful to the Chinese speaking audience.

    They are also adding some local cultural references to the game, for instance “Bocelli,” the Italian opera star and Spanish actor Mario Casas.

    As far as celebrity buzz for the game, Zynga turned to J-Lo and Enrique Iglesias. In addition to promoting the game and “engaging players” on Twitter, the two singers will also choose words that will be available in the new “Special Words” feature within the game.

    “Draw Something has only been available to players in English since its launch and became a cultural phenomenon across the globe. We are excited to be able to give back to our players around the world by offering an experience that is more locally relevant to them.” said David Ko, chief mobile officer for Zynga. “With native pop culture references and our partnership with global superstars such as Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez, the game will be even more fun for more players. How do you draw ‘caliente’? We’ll soon find out.”

    Shortly after Zynga acquired OMGPOP, Draw Something lost some 5 million users. Since then, the app has continued to see a pretty steady decline.

    Zynga is preparing to announce additional partnerships for Draw Something, including one with Dreamworks that would see in-game promotion for their new Madagascar film.