RSS
Using crowd-sourced translations, Facebook launches in Spanish
February 8th, 2008
Taking the first step in its long awaited plans to internationalize, Facebook tonight launched in its second language: Spanish. With over 1,500 users translating over 40,000 sentences in just under four weeks, almost every piece of system text was translated and voted on by the community.
“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 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement. With over 64 million members, that puts over 38 million outside the US. Here’s a breakdown of where Facebook users live, by country:
| Canada | 8,724,260 |
| United Kingdom | 8,680,900 |
| Turkey | 2,848,020 |
| Australia | 2,347,200 |
| France | 1,279,920 |
| Sweden | 1,095,440 |
| Norway | 1,067,540 |
| Colombia | 777,960 |
| South Africa | 732,660 |
| Mexico | 648,360 |
| Egypt | 612,720 |
| India | 540,820 |
| Germany | 481,880 |
| Finland | 429,840 |
| Israel | 427,940 |
| Singapore | 421,240 |
| Denmark | 409,800 |
| Spain | 333,040 |
| New Zealand | 312,280 |
| Malaysia | 296,700 |
| United Arab Emirates | 286,820 |
| Belgium | 258,340 |
| Lebanon | 252,060 |
| Italy | 239,560 |
| Ireland | 228,900 |
| Switzerland | 221,100 |
| Saudi Arabia | 202,020 |
| Greece | 184,300 |
| Netherlands | 181,700 |
| Pakistan | 179,600 |
| China | 170,620 |
| Jordan | 150,220 |
| Japan | 142,180 |
| Venezuela | 137,100 |
| Thailand | 115,600 |
| Philippines | 112,340 |
| Indonesia | 111,620 |
| Chile | 106,960 |
| Panama | 105,620 |
| Argentina | 96,620 |
| Austria | 81,860 |
| Korea, Republic of | 75,860 |
| Kuwait | 69,980 |
| Peru | 68,200 |
| Russian Federation | 64,160 |
| Dominican Republic | 53,020 |
Facebook will be launching in French and German next. As the fourth largest country on Facebook, Turkey is getting no love!
|
|
Download The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
February 8th, 2008 at 4:08 am
[...] found the following quote and a pretty useful country by country breakdown over at the InsideFacebook blog [...]
February 8th, 2008 at 7:42 am
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 become 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.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Now they’ve got to allow the developers to catch up, with translated application titles, and language data in the API so we can translate our applications appropriately.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, 1500 usuarios han traducido mas de 40.000 oraciones al español en menos de 4 semanas. Casí cada texto ha sido traducido y [...]
February 10th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
I am wondering why Hong Kong is not listed, from what my rep told me, it has more active members than India.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
[...] In its continuing efforts to build an international audience, Facebook today announced the release of the site translated into German. Starting today, any person who goes to Facebook.com from a German-speaking country will automatically see the site in German. With only 480,000 users, Germany is the 13th largest country on Facebook, according to stats gathered last month. [...]
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:09 am
I wonder if “China” includes Hong Kong. Hong Kong seems to have a lot of active Facebook users based on my experience.
July 30th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Hi Dominic
I am a freelance producer in KL.Have a Prod house which has complete inhouse Prod and Post facilities.If you have any projects to be shot in the south-east-asian region,kindly let me know.
Rgds
shiuli