Facebook Gets Aggressive On Translations, Adding 22 More Languages

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1. 113.com
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 2:01 pm

   It’s certainly time to do that… cf. MySpace’s…

2. Ryan Merket
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 2:03 pm

   Great move by Facebook. There IS a market outside of the US/Canada.

3. Michael Arrington
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 2:04 pm

   Ryan - recent stats from FB say 2/3 of their users are non-US. It was 50/50 last Fall.

4. 113.com
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 2:10 pm

   @3
   or better yet.. 2/3 of their users are non-US and non-China..
   Anyway, for China, need some special formulas, i18n/l10n alone isn’t enough…

5. Saeed
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 2:38 pm

   where is arabic? middle east is well established on the site (lebanon, iraq, palestine)…

6. David Kahn
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 3:39 pm

   Wow Arrington, answer your inbox messages, 785? I’ve never seen that many. And I thought having three unread messages was unbelievable. Now I have to translate that into Polski all by myself. I envy Facebook *waves fist in air*!

7. eee eee
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 4:05 pm

   hey

8. Tyler Wright
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 5:20 pm

   Ya, I reckon 785 inbox messages is pretty hardcore.

9. Jon
   

   March 31st, 2008 at 6:09 pm

   Let me see, a company worth 15B has to ask it’s USERS to work for FREE to help them translate the site so that their over-inflated evaluation can be puffed-up even higher?

   I don’t get it. I am all for crowd sourcing for good causes but when you have more “perceived value” then most countries on this planet… don’t you think asking users to do this a little wacky?

   Jon
   http://dreamclue.com … get the message!

10. mike periu
    

    March 31st, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    I think its great that Facebook is expanding its multilingual reach through this initiative. I am however, disappointed that they did not choose to use professional translators for such an important task. Relying on the user base won’t necessarily produce optimal translations and can lead to common problems such as:
    >grammatical and spelling errors that will turn off many users;
    >selection of slang used only by certain subgroups or cultural groups that are not shared by other speakers of that language;
    >use of terms that are acceptable in one country that speaks a certain language but unacceptable (or even offensive) to residents of another country that speak that language.

    Professional translators (of which there are many) who are trained and certified for this task could do this job properly. Given the global marketplace for translations, this could have been done for globally competitive rates too.

    Of course if your customers are willing to do your work for free, its hard to go against that, but the risks associated with quality and efficacy are too great for a company trying to establish a global brand.

11. Irene Smith
    

    March 31st, 2008 at 9:21 pm

    Considering the enormous size of the non English speaking market and Facebooks aggressive corporate culture, this is a very logical move.

    Irene Green lasers guide

12. Jean-Marie Le Ray
    

    March 31st, 2008 at 9:23 pm

    Wow, I’ve got exactly what people will need to help Facebook to localize!
    Just try this Win-Win App: http://apps.facebook.com/translationstwo/
    Read the Win-Win Contest Rules @ http://translation2.com/index.php?id=26 and the search engine FAQ @ http://translation2.com/index.php?id=24
    Enjoy! And by the way, this is not an April Fool’s joke!!!
    Jean-Marie

13. Sean
    

    March 31st, 2008 at 9:45 pm

    Wow, your 4th post on Facebook localizing their web site.

    I’m about to stab my fucking eyes out with how old this is getting.

14. Luke Noel-Storr
    

    March 31st, 2008 at 11:35 pm

    I still want to know when they’re going to let us translate the site into English, so that I can list my ‘Favourite TV Programmes’ and say that I met people at ‘Primary School’, ‘Secondary School’, or ‘University’.

15. Mario Mansour
    

    April 1st, 2008 at 6:02 am

    I only hope (maybe dream) that users don’t listen to this. Like Jon said, I don’t really get it why are they asking their users to do it.
    They got the money, why not hire teams to do the translations.

    What are people getting from this translation anyway?? It’s in no way Win-Win App (Jean-Marie Le Ray) that’s Facebook only wins.

    Users trying to translation should already be doing fine with english, why bother translating it to another language? Just to let more users with less language skills join? Who the winner now?

    There’s only one message here: If they want to go international, let Mark do the job himself

16. Fidel Cast
    

    April 1st, 2008 at 9:14 pm

    Who uses Facebook? Who would do anything for those guys?

17. Albert
    

    April 1st, 2008 at 10:02 pm

    If you think about it, this is a pretty crazy project. On average, someone would translate about 200 words for 10 dollars. Let’s say each language has 50,000 words to be translated. That’s 500,000 dollars for each langauge. 22 Languages equals 1.1 million in savings. Not a bad idea…