Hey Amigo, Facebook in Spanish
Published by Rodney Rumford February 7th, 2008 in Facebook.
Hey Amigo, Facebook in Spanish: Last week facebook quietly added some additional site translations to the website. It would appear that the site is nearly translated in Spanish. It is fun to see the translations appear in the site. Having the translation live is going to really help facebook on an international level as the international audience continues to grow at a rapid place.
The translation tool only only works on native facebook phrases. Applications are not translated (yet). We published an article about facebook doing language translation via crowdsourcing in December.
To change the site language to either Spanish, French or German facebook users simply choose from the translations panel drop down menu on the international tab on the top right side of the website. (it is a globe icon)
“Over 60 percent of Facebook users are now outside of the U.S., and many live in countries where English is not the primary language” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. “Our goal has always been to allow people to use Facebook in their native language so we built an application to enable users to participate in translating the site into their local languages and dialects. We really appreciate the contribution from users in translating Facebook.”
It looks like facebook is close to getting the site completely launched in French very soon.
UPDATE: More details of the facebook language translation offering and how it will work (even with mobile devices) here. It looks like applications are in fact next in line for the translation process.
TechCrunch also has an interesting take on the facebook language translation issue.
Here is what facebook looks like in spanish. Later Amigos!
7 Responses to “Hey Amigo, Facebook in Spanish”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 7th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
That would be German, not Dutch.
Corrected. Thanks Matt.
It was time to do so, the Hispanic market is very important for social networks.
http://facebooknoticias.blogspot.com
Rodney where did you find this option?
Facebook took a long time to launch its first new language. The first step to making the site a truly global player. In the meantime, a few social networks have been working hard to get the attention of those users and communities, specially in the Latin American arena.
An example of it its Sonico.com (http://www.sonico.com), who un under than 6 months has managed to register over 7 million hispanic members and gaining an average of 100k new registrations daily to become the biggest and fastest Spanish social network.
So, will Facebook be able to secure the Hispanic market, or will the local player have too big a stronghold? This has already happened in a few other markets (ie Brazil, South Korea).
Is simply translating a site enough to compete in a market like the Latin American one? The Myspace experience so far shows you need more than that (for example, all applications must be translated, or new ones creates just for Spanish). And this is what paves the way for the local players’ success, as in the case of Sonico
The problem with Facebook in Spanish so far is that advertisers can’t use Spanish characters and punctuation, which limits a lot the use of the platform. The good news is that it can’t only improve!