Facebook Encouraging More Users to Translate as International Growth Increases

October 7th, 2008

As a sign of Facebook’s growing international reach, the Facebook crowd-sourced translation tool released earlier this year is now being pushed to an increasing number of users as they log into Facebook. Many people logging in will see the one-time message like this one below:

Facebook translation tool

The tool allows users to translate Facebook and many Facebook applications into their own language through in-place editing, but to-date has not been a feature that most users are aware of.

This should also encourage more Facebook application developers to enable Translations within their applications as the number of users who are translating increases. Although implementing the translation tool within an application is not yet a completely smooth process, it can actually be quite effective. (As a personal anecdote, since building the necessary tags into my Six Degrees application it has been translated into Spanish by a total of 35 different translators, and other languages are almost complete.)