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Now you can help translate Facebook into any language
April 2nd, 2008
For months, volunteer translators around the world have been using Facebook’s innovative Translations application to translate all 24,000 phrases on Facebook into Spanish, German, and French. Now, Facebook has opened up the Translation application to everyone in order to translate Facebook into every major language on earth.
How does it work?
1. Add the Translations app and choose your language. (Currently, there are translation projects going on in English, Français, Deutsch, Español, Català, Čeština, Dansk, Euskara, Galego, Italiano, 한국어, Magyar, Norsk, 日本語, Nederlands, Polski, Português do Brasil, Română, Русский, Slovenščina, Suomi, Svenska, ภาษาไทย, Türkçe, 中文(简体), 中文(繁體).)
2. Turn on in-line editing. This will highlight every word on Facebook that needs translating. You can click on each phrase and vote on translations submitted by others or submit a new translation yourself.
3. Browse the translations directory to view and translate more phrases. You can browse and vote on any of the 24,000 phrases. Facebook’s top translators have had thousands of translations accepted!
This is one of the most elegant approaches to localization I’ve seen, making it easy for everyone to contribute, if even only a word or two. Nice job, Facebook Translations team!
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April 2nd, 2008 at 6:00 pm
It’s a nice idea although it doesn’t work very well. They should just pay a few professional translators - after the big payout from Microsoft they must have the money, and it would be much quicker and of better quality. I used the Spanish version when it launched for about a month, but switched back to English because there were SO MANY errors. Guys being referred to as girls and vice versa, singular forms used when the subject was plural or even a mixture of both in one sentence. Sometimes the errors would change from day to day, but they wouldn’t be replaced by a correct translation, just new errors. Also sometimes I saw random formatting instructions in English eg: instead of displaying the date once it said ” dates in Spanish are not displayed like this please see style guide for more information” or something like that.
April 6th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
The idea of freelance translators is not bad, even for multimillionaire company like fb.
When they allowed my language - bulgarian, to be translate, i`ll do my best. There can`t be any mistakes, but they`ll disappear. Voting for some translation from other person in same country will give more quality i think…
April 21st, 2008 at 2:00 am
[...] http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/04/02/now-you-can-help-translate-facebook-into-any-language/ [...]
April 22nd, 2008 at 5:29 am
Why is there no other language here like Uyghur?
Can we translate the facebook to Uyghur ??
May 21st, 2008 at 6:01 am
[...] its launch earlier this year, Facebook Translations has spurred on significant international growth for the primarily English-speaking social network. [...]
June 24th, 2008 at 2:27 am
[...] addition, Facebook announced today that it has added 55 new languages to its crowd-sourced translation efforts. Facebook’s Chad Little says, Now native speakers can use our Translations application to [...]