i18n and L10n: 9 - Facebook

October 4th 2009

A blog post about my personal adulation for the Latin Facebook translation

The power and wealth of any social network are the users of the service. The users create the content and commercial value for the company. With out regular active users the company simply owns just another website. Facebook understands the value of community and how to mobilise the community to work on translations.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote in his article entitled "Facebook Spreads Its Crowdsourced Translations Across the Web, And The World" that:

Facebook has long relied on its own users to help translate the site into more than 65 different languages.

I personally believe that this is an extremely unfair view as the process creates a personal interest for Facebook. It is smart for Facebook both financially and socially to delegate the translation to users. The activity will create new communities within its ecosystem and value for users. This will ensure the users commitment and to return in future to the website.

I appreciate this is a very belated post as the translation application has been available for two years. According to Elizabeth Linder on the Facebook Blog there more than 70 languages available both sensible and humours such as the Pirate translation. The application allows users to translate interface text and vote on the optimum version by the community of users.

The interesting point and theme Elizabeth carries through her article is the notoriously dead language, Latin, is now an available Facebook translation. What a gloriously obscure and fascinating use for the Translation application. To produce a valid and working lingua latina Localization for the social network in language seen as irrelevant by school children across the globe is a wonderful achievement.

I must admit that I too found myself challenged and dishearten by learning Latin in school for one academic year. However I do now see its value. Where many people fail to appreciate is without the Latin we would not have the European languages we use today. I find learning about the translators efforts relevant and not wasteful. Their hard work has created an alternative and engaging resource for students to practice reading Latin away from textbooks in a familiar environment. Bravo!

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