Twitter Reveals Language Geographic Distribution

Twitter Reveals Language Geographic Distribution
推特揭示了语言地理分布
About six million people worldwide post to Twitter, producing some 650,000 new tweets daily. And one percent of these posts include geographic locations. The combination of language and location has allowed scientists to calculate the dominant language of any given region. They presented their work at the American Physical Society's March Meeting. [Delia Mocanu et al.,Language Geography from Microblogging Platforms]
每天全世界大约有六百万人向Twitter发状态，产生650000条新状态。这些状态中，1%的状态包含地理位置。语言和位置的组合使得科学家可以计算特定区域的主要语言。他们把他们的工作发表在American Physical Society's March Meeting. [Delia Mocanu et al.,Language Geography from Microblogging Platforms]
The researchers gained free access to a 10th of all tweets, which they ran through an automated language detector. Throwing Twitter languages onto a map revealed highly accurate borders for European countries, a good proof of concept for the effort. On a much smaller scale, Twitter language geography reflected the small pockets of Korean and Russian concentrations within New York City.
研究人员获取了10%的状态，然后进行自动语言探测。把推特语言映射到地图可以高度匹配欧洲的国界，这从概念很好的证明了他们的工作。在小范围内，推特语言的地理性反映了少量韩国与俄罗斯的族群集中在纽约市。
The Twitter tracking method has its biases. English is the dominant language of the internet, which skews the language distribution in bilingual cities like Montreal. And, obviously, the scientists can't analyze areas where people don't use Twitter. But overall, the study shows that Twitter can provide cheap and useful information. In other words, people tend to speak what they tweet.
推特跟踪方法也有误差。英语是互联网上的主导语言，因而在像Montreal这样的双语城市有所偏差。并且，很明显，科学家们不能分析人们不用推特的地区。但是总体来说，该研究显示推特可以提供便宜和有用的信息。也就是说，人们发到推特上状态，一般都是他们想说的话。