20 November 2009: Twitter now available in French

A few articles in French on this have just appeared, such as this one. French is the fourth language on Twitter, after English, Japanese, and Spanish. A few terms on Twitter in French are as follows:

• Tweet (Votre message sur Twitter / Your message on Twitter) - Tweet
• Tweet (Le verbe Tweeter / The verb to tweet) - Tweeter
• Twitterer (Personne utilisant Twitter / A person using Twitter) - Tweeteur / Tweeteuse
• Followers (Ceux qui vous suivent / Those that are following you) - Abonnés
• Followings (Ceux que vous suivez / What you are following) - Abonnements
• Direct Message (Boite de réception / Inbox) - Message Privé
• Retweet (Reprendre un message / Repeat a message) - Retweet
• Trending Topics (Les sujets chauds / Hot subjects) - A la Une
• Timeline (Messages dont vous avez accès / Messages you have access to) - Flux Personnel
• What's happening? (Ce que vous allez écrire / What you are writing) - Quoi de neuf?

An article here also notes Twitter's growing importance in France:

Twitter has had a certain acceleration over the past months in France. Indeed, more and more journalists and political personalities have been won over by this site permitting one to send messages limited to 140 characters, with examples such as Lionel Tardy, Christine Boutin, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Benoit Hamon and even Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. Recently, Twitter was even at the centre of a small linguistic controversy in the Senate between the Minister of Industry, Christian Estrosi, and the socialist senator Martial Bourquin, in the discussion on a bill on the post office.

You can see that video in French in the Senate here.

Edit: this site also has an interesting number: when Facebook was translated into French in 2008 it received an extra 600,000 visitors over a month as a result, so this is a big incentive for sites like this to obtain some extra traffic without really having to do anything but ask users to translate the site and provide a means for them to do so. Everybody wins.