Facebook taps users’ talent
TOKYO – The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $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 – aiding the company’s aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the United States.
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, Calif. “Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook.”
But 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 B. 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” or “does”) and usage of the word “lenguaje” for “language” rather than the correct “idioma.”
Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.
Facebook points out that 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.
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 and more on the way.
Its global push, which began in early 2006, appears to be paying off. Between June 2006 and June 2007, its number of visitors worldwide age 15 and older jumped 72 percent to 114.1 million, according to Internet research firm comScore Inc.
In the same period, however, Facebook’s global traffic surged 270 percent to 52.2 million users, according to comScore – even though it had yet to launch its first foreign-language site.