« Previous post
Next post »

February 7, 2008

Facebook Turns 1,500 Users Into Spanish Translation Slaves

Michael Arrington

47 comments »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Facebook’s innovative approach to translating its site into various laguages - get the users to do all the work.

Users can ask to translate bits of the site, which are then voted on by other users until a good localized version is created. Users have been hard at work translating Facebook into German, Spanish and French.

Facebook says that the Spanish site was completed in less than four weeks and is based on the work of nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking Facebook users. One user alone, though, was responsible for translating almost 3% of the site.Facebook has 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain.

Today Facebook opened up the Spanish version of the site. If you visit Facebook from a Spanish-prevalent country starting next week, the default language will be auto set to Spanish. Users can also change the default language to Spanish in their account settings.

Facebook takes a very different approach to localized sites than rival MySpace, which is opening up offices all over the world to serve those markets.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. ¿Qué Pasa, Amigo? Asks Facebook

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

  2. mojbiznes.pl

    February 12th, 2008 at 3:00 am

  3. Madrid Spain » Blog Archive » Facebook Turns 1500 Users Into Spanish Translation Slaves

    March 15th, 2008 at 3:42 am

  4. Facebook Gets Aggressive On Translations, Adding 22 More Languages

    March 31st, 2008 at 1:59 pm

  5. Business News Research » Facebook Gets Aggressive On Translations, Adding 22 More Languages

    March 31st, 2008 at 10:52 pm

  6. Leo’s Top Five | Whooah.biz

    April 9th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Ze'ev

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    hah take that Murdoch! this is how you expand globally!

  2. Ben

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:29 pm

    I think for the long term MySpace’s strategy is more costly but makes more sense. Adapting a social network to a local market is much more than just translating it.

  3. Done Before

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:37 pm

    Their innovative approach has been done before. http://ptrans.wikyblog.com is open to all GPL projects.

  4. MikeT

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:40 pm

    Hey, I think that those 1500 people felt privileged to do it for free for Facebook.
    At least, they get the bragging rights, and with FB’s size they will look cool.

    Good move, FB.

  5. allen stern

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:41 pm

    lol @5 mikeT - could you picture them at the next facebook meetup - “hey i converted the site to x language, im cool” :)

  6. ted

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:23 pm

    ya simpy.com has the same approach and about a dozen languages

    Myspace is taking the expected non agile route

  7. New Fast Browser

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:26 pm

    Le Sabla Espanol

    http://www.jhatak.com/Buckler/BucklerHomePage.htm

  8. Prashant

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    Meebo has done exactly the same thing . Whats the big deal Mike ?
    Give Zuck a break ..he is just in his 20s

  9. Derrick

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    I wonder if there was anybody who went to counter check all the translations for accuracy.

  10. David

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:48 pm

    Describing Facebook’s approach as innovative is so out of touch. This has been done by companies for years. And by years, I mean there are examples of this in the pre-internet world…

  11. Veronica Alvarez

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

    interesting…
    I have to check the site, I’m really intrigued….I have to wonder where the translators came from…
    someone from Spain, or Mexico, Argentina, etc. will definitely have different styles of translating….
    even with French, in Quebec some language will be different than that in France…
    also gotta wonder if there’s any QA for the translation done at the end…

    I think since they have managed to get users to work like this, they should create local translations for Mexico, Spain, Argentina, etc… some users will be happy to do this, and then have a final QA run by an expert.

    definitely interesting…

  12. Carlos

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:27 pm

    Good point Veronica.

    I wonder if the users got any type of recognition on FB so they can brag about it as MikeT says

  13. pat k

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:40 pm

    Netvibes has long since used this approach…

  14. nedders

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:18 pm

    pat k - right on Netvibes fan - you beat me to post this by minutes!

  15. Juan Pablo Sueiro

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:46 pm

    I posted this opinion also in mashable. Maybe here can also discuss this that involves not only facebook but other worldwide apps.

    Facebook took a long time to finish this important task to open their platform massively to spanish-speaking users.
    In the meanwhile, diffent social networks have been working hard to get the attention of those users and communities.
    An example of it its Sonico.com (http://www.sonico.com) that in less than 6 month from the first release have registered more than 7 million hispanic members and gaining an average of 100k new daily to became the biggest and fastest spanish social network.

    But the question here is beyond this topic.
    Is this Facebook´s move enough to get new hispanic users?.
    I dont think so.
    Obviously, this will help and probably a new wave of members will join, but to get the “mass network effect” they will need to work hard and not only relay to “users workforce” to adapt their strategy for this new market. Also, some other core releases and along term commitment is needed in order to adapt the site to the idiosyncrasy of latam and spanish speaking users.

  16. Bob Dole

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:58 pm

    wow…521 piles of shit in your inbox…

  17. Alaattin Kahramanlar

    February 7th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    Is it interesting? Absolutely no…

    Google made users to translate all google services in the past.

  18. Sean

    February 7th, 2008 at 11:24 pm

    Michael, this approach by Facebook is NOT innovative. I’m not saying it’s bad, in fact it’s a great way to do it, but FB did not invent it, as you seem to think. Netvibes is an example of a large web site that used this method to localize their site. We’re about to do the same thing with our service (getclicky.com).

    For the love of Christ, get over your infatuation with Facebook already.

  19. Piyush

    February 8th, 2008 at 12:42 am

    @8: Prashant

    I was about to say the same, have known Meebo to take the same approach earlier.

    Thanks for the news though, Mike.

  20. Jeff

    February 8th, 2008 at 12:54 am

    Actually, the website http://www.phrasebase.com incorporated this idea 8 years ago. It was innovative back then!

  21. robojiannis

    February 8th, 2008 at 12:56 am

    Slaves? come on!
    So all these open source and free software, which are developed by the community (for free) are actually developed by slaves??
    Too much.

  22. JP

    February 8th, 2008 at 1:47 am

    Well innovative approach yes, but this way of translating a website was already used 2 years ago by

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....community/

    and 5 years ago by http://www.pepere.org/

  23. Rodrigo Asensio

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:44 am

    Slaves ??? horrible post, they are willing to do it.

  24. Rodney Rumford

    February 8th, 2008 at 3:42 am

    Classic example of crowdsourcing. Facebook has got serious game. Innovative thinking for sure. I love it.

    Did you know that application translation is also coming very soon!

    http://facereviews.com/2008/02.....ming-soon/

  25. Helen Clark

    February 8th, 2008 at 4:54 am

    This post just shows how fucking ignorant Michael Arrington is. By the way I love your site…keep up the good work.

  26. CanCar

    February 8th, 2008 at 5:33 am

    I think since they have managed to get users to work like this, they should create local translations for latins… some users will be happy to do this, and then have a final QA run by an expert.

  27. Linguist

    February 8th, 2008 at 5:35 am

    ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ may be a cliché, but ‘crowd-sourced’ localisation attempts are often disastrous. I don’t know Spanish, but look at the Tamil version of Orkut, Wordpress, and Microsoft’s now-defunct BhashaIndia.com glossary project. Techies and people who’ve no clue about translation or software/web interfact localisation take charge and completely mess it up.

  28. John

    February 8th, 2008 at 5:39 am

    I’d like to see these loyal facebook users be compensated….not sure how much, maybe even a draw for some prizes or something…instead they’ll just get more ads (in spanish or some other language) in their news stream!

  29. Pietro

    February 8th, 2008 at 6:29 am

    Hi guys, we at FON are hosting a Facebook Developers Garage in Madrid. Facebook will present the translation project and the opportunities for developers wishing to create FB applications in Spanish. Developers will demo their apps. All the details on Martin Varsavsky’s blog.

    http://english.martinvarsavsky.....erman.html

  30. Niraj

    February 8th, 2008 at 6:40 am

    As Ben (#2) mentioned, there’s more to expanding internationally than just translations. In particular, what about support? Their site may be in Spanish, but can they answer Spanish support questions? And can they add features that would make sense to those specific regions but maybe not the US?

    Myspace’s approach seems to make more sense.

  31. vozome

    February 8th, 2008 at 6:57 am

    linguist, I agree with you.
    I’ve checked the Facebook-> French translation process, which is similar. I have been impressed by the quality of the tools deployed. they run all kind of tests on your submitted translation, for instance, to check if punctuation is kosher, if you are using the right terms from the glossary, etc. and the validation system of the phrases is also quite powerful.
    Yet, the overall quality of the translation is poor. why? people don’t bother to use the {=syntax} suggested by facebook. the incentive is really to do as many phrases as possible, as opposed to do them as well as possible.
    speaking of incentive, i guess that pro translators that can claim a spot in the translation leaderboard (yes, just like in kongregate…) gain more than bragging rights. to get contracts, they need to be able to showcase their achievements…

  32. SEO tips

    February 8th, 2008 at 8:00 am

    Good information in social networking perspective. Its like localizing globally. I hope the guys can help Wikipedia also..

  33. rubu

    February 8th, 2008 at 8:47 am

    http://vanguardetf.net/ Una exelnte noticia para inmenzo mundo de habla castellana. Equal information for all most of the world is all out bilingual

  34. Ambrosius Amadeus

    February 8th, 2008 at 10:28 am

    Several years ago, when IBM was faced with updating a massive customer database, they took a similar approach by having their global sales reps update data pertaining to their clients. The end result was a highly accurate database that was reconstructed in record time.

    When you have a community of people working together to create or rebuild data you get better data. This is why Wikipedia is successful. And getting community members to participate at no cost… all the better for any company’s bottom line.

  35. randy

    February 8th, 2008 at 11:21 am

    COME ON, people. Social Networking = SLAVERY. Not just because it’s now overrun by marketing thugs, but essentially because it is a form of ubiquitous computing, and ubiquitous computer turns REAL UGLY, REAL FAST when it is programmed with needy instincts.

    Thank god finally somebody with a popular blog has posted about this.

    The other day I read about the plant that uses RFID to beep you when it needs water. Oh MY GOD, don’t you people realize what is happening here?

    BEEP! Patrick has upgraded his Hotwire account!
    BEEP! Stacy pinched you!
    BEEP! 13 new photos were uploaded by Herb.
    BEEP! Stacy pinched you!
    BEEP! Bob Parker wishes Yoa Lin a happy Birthday!
    BEEP! Stacy pinched Jesse!
    BEEP!
    BEEP!

  36. MikeT

    February 8th, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    @34: nobody holds the social networking addictees with a certain network.
    People are naturally interested in each other - from the times we walk on this planet till this day.
    The fact that 1500 people put in their time and efforts to translate for free a web site into their own language does not make them losers. They did it voluntarily, which does not conform to the definition of slavery.
    Yes, FB is a commercial beast now, yes it will make money using those people’s work and it is not obliged to share any of its profits with them.
    Were the 1500 exploited? Some will say they were, some will say they were not, but it was their choice, so let them decide how to feel about it.

  37. MikeT

    February 8th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

    sorry my message was to randy

  38. leo

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    Hi Michael, just thought I would let you know that this post my made my top five posts over at: http://www.workconnexions.com/.....pFive.aspx

    Great stuff.. :-)

  39. Nir Levin

    February 8th, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    Innovative? Not really, Wikipedia, Meebo, Netvibes and Snap.com did it long time ago.

  40. Furies

    February 9th, 2008 at 9:00 am

    Great…I clear my cache and cookies every day after I quit Firefox, so every time I visit the site I have to see it in spanish? WHAT THE HELL FACEBOOK….

  41. BritishYosef

    February 10th, 2008 at 1:43 am

    This might explain a glitch giving me a spanish log in page for facebook mobile in Israel yesterday.

« Previous post
Next post »