Facebook Is Moving toward Multi-Language Ecosystem: They are tapping facebook users to help them with a crowdsourcing application around a very specific task. They have created an application called Translations that allows users to translate facebook. Users can also vote on phrases to help get the most common usage phrases correct.

This is the ultimate crowdsourcing idea and execution for language translation on a social network. People will beat a path to help since facebook is their passion and nothing would make them prouder than to have a hand in brining localization to their native language.

I love it. There are already 839 people translating the site to Spanish. All for a whopping cost of ZERO Dollars. Users also vote on translations (up or down). This just might be the first high visibility use case of a facebook application for mass collaboration. Hello Wikipedia.

Once you’ve added the translation app, you can enable “Translation Mode” which will let you submit translations for any page you are browsing on facebook.

I talked with some facebook people back in October about multi language capability and asked would it be coming? I did not get a definitive answer, but had an inclination that they were working on some ideas. I was talking with a person from Japan at the same time and we were talking about translating this blog into Japanese at the time and how many cultures like to interact in their primary language.

Facebook has been spreading like wildfire in many foreign countries. Turkey, as an example; has exploded to well over 2+ million facebook users in the last 3 months. There are people from many countries using the Facebook Language Translations app: France, Brazil, Spain, Russia, Honduras, Chile, etc.

It would appear that facebook is focused on translating to Spanish first. I am sure many other languages will follow. The funny thing is Spanish has many different localizations (Spanish (Catilan) in Barcelona Spain for example is different than Spanish in Costa Rica). They have a way for people to discuss the translations. Nice.

The word from Facebook: “Join our community of translators and make Facebook available to everyone, everywhere, in all languages. Use the Translations application to submit translations and vote to help determine which translations are published on Facebook”.

UPDATE: Here is the official word from facebook’s Brandee Barker on 12-28. “We’ve released an application to allow Facebook users to help and contribute to the translation of site. We are testing the adoption of it in the spanish language first and have given several thousand users the option to participate if they install the application. We’ll continue to expand to other translators depending on how quickly people engage.” She also added “We will also continue to evaluate more traditional forms of translation services”.

Facebook Translation Application will bring many different languages to the facebook eco-system via crowdsourcing.

Translate facebook phrases from english to spanish

Vote on facebook spanish translations. There is a discussion area where people can explain and make the case for their phrase translation.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook language, crowdsourcing

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