Twitter announced two rather significant improvements to its platform today – most notably the inclusion of additional countries and cities in Trending Topics and Translations.

Trending Topics provide a glimpse into the most tweeted-about topics on Twitter within a timeline on the sidebar of your Twitter account page. (Deeper history/data on the most popular topics can be seen on the logged out Twitter.com homepage by the way.) For quite some time Twitter has shown the most tweeted about topics near users, but today announced it is expanding its local trends to include 13 new countries and 6 new cities – some of their fastest growing markets, of course.

Twitter also announced they are using Google Translate to display Tweet translations in the details pane to give people more access to what people are tweeting. The feature is currently available to only a small percentage of users but will be rolled out in the coming weeks to everyone.