Twitter plans Chinese-language version

Dorsey, who spoke of Twitter’s plans to open a Chinese registration page during a conference in New York, said that "it's just a matter of time" before Twitter is available in the country.

According to the Associated Press, Dorsey added that, "step one is translation, getting the site accessible in a Chinese version … That's something the company is really pushing to do."

Twitter has been blocked in China since the summer of 2009. In June, the site was blocked for several days surrounding the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protest.

One month later, Chinese authorities imposed a nationwide block on Twitter following the outbreak of large-scale ethnic rioting in Xinjiang province.

However, according to blog ReadWriteWeb, whose founder also participated in the panel, Dorsey said that despite being unsure of whether Twitter wants to move into China, there are still plans to offer a Chinese translation. 

The blog noted that Dorsey wasn’t aware that Twitter was blocked in China until a few weeks ago.

According to William Bao Bean, partner at Softbank China & India Holdings, Twitter would be expected to start from the ground up in China in order to launch its operations, which means registering itself as a new entity and vow to adhere to censorship regulations, similar to a policy that Google China is trying to shed.

“To launch a site in China, you have to conform to Chinese regulations, which means that you have to apply and receive an ICP licence,” he said.

Mathew McDougall, group CEO and executive chairman of SinoTech Group, added that in order for Twitter to operate in China it would essentially need to create two types of itself.

“I don’t think anything in terms of its operations will change at all. The way it’s going to work is that microblogging in China will be kept within China and be self-regulated, so that it’ll be easy to close it down,” he said.

“Twitter will have to have two versions – the global, English-language version and then the Chinese version that it’s prepared to regulate. It’s like how there’s an internet for the rest of the world and then there’s China’s internet. These things come in two versions.”