The social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than US$15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.
Its users around the world are translating Facebook’s visible framework into nearly two dozen languages — for free — and helping the company’s aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the US.
The company says it’s using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines — especially terms specific to Facebook — that are in tune with local cultures.
“We thought it’d be cool,” said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California. “Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook.”
Coolness aside — and many users are embracing the idea — other social networks aren’t “crowdsourcing” translation services. The move is generating mounting criticism online, where some users question whether amateurs can produce good translations. Critics complain of sloppiness and skimping, even as Facebook says it is improving service in an innovative way.
The concept of collaborative translation is familiar in open-source programming communities. But Facebook’s effort — as it builds sites in Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch to join versions in Spanish, French and German that launched this year — is among the highest-profile attempts to harness users’ energy to do work traditionally handled by professionals.
The Spanish-language version has taken a particular beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems throughout.
Ana Torres, a 25-year-old professional translator in Madrid, Spain, called the translation “extremely poor,” citing “outrageous spelling mistakes” such as “ase” instead of “hace” (for “makes”) and usage of the word “lenguaje” for “language” rather than “idioma.”
Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.
Valentin Macias, 29, a Californian who teaches English in Seoul, South Korea, has volunteered in the past to translate for the nonprofit Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, but said he won’t do it for Facebook.
“[Wikipedia is] an altruistic, charitable, information-sharing, donation-supported cause,” Macias said in a Facebook message. “Facebook is not. Therefore, people should not be tricked into donating their time and energy to a multimillion-dollar company so that the company can make millions more — at least not without some type of compensation.”
Facebook says it has spent considerable resources building the translation program. Olivan said it’s not soaking users but including them in the growth of the network — and possibly attracting new ones.
“If the goal is to save money, we’re doing the wrong thing, because we are basically spending our most valuable asset, which is engineering time,” he said.
He said that Facebook relishes being different from competitors and that users are helping the company produce versions in numerous languages as quickly as possible.
One-fifth of the world’s Internet population actively manages profiles on a social network, said David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster Inc, which has recently shifted its focus to capitalize on its strength in Southeast Asia.
“It’s still a bit of a land grab,” he said. “So there’s plenty of growth to be had in the world and we’re focused on that and certainly other social networks I’m sure are as well.”
Friendster recently launched a beta version in Vietnamese, adding to its lineup of versions in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian. It plans to keep introducing a new language every month or two.
Setting the pace, however, is industry leader MySpace. The News Corp subsidiary has 200 million registered users worldwide and 29 country-specific and regional sites.
Its global push, which began in early 2006, is paying off. Between June 2006 and June last year, its number visitors worldwide age 15 and older jumped 72 percent to 114.1 million, Internet research firm comScore Inc said.
In the same period, however, Facebook’s global traffic surged 270 percent to 52.2 million users, comScore said.
As it enters each market, MySpace hires a dedicated team, said Travis Katz, international managing director. Contractors perform the translation, which the MySpace team tweaks.
Friendster also uses professional translators.
“As interesting as it might be to get your users to chip in and help out on that, we could do it faster ourselves and very consistently,” Jones said.
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