As you may have heard, we've just launched the Spanish version of Facebook. Facebook in multiple languages has been a long-standing request from many of our users, and we're quite happy to be able to take the first step. We anticipate that in the coming weeks and months we will launch other translated versions of our site, with the next ones being in French and German.
Having worked on internationalization at other companies, I can say that the strategy we took at Facebook in translating our site has been quite non-traditional.
Have you ever been on a site where they've translated the content into your language but it still sounds horribly awkward? Sometimes I am, and I think to myself, "Wow, why didn't they just have a native speaker do a quick review of this stuff? I don't know Russian myself, but even I could fix all this broken English." We wanted to arrange things so you could do exactly that.
We created a feature to allow users to submit proposed translations of the strings we display on our site, and then we implemented a Reddit-like voting system to allow those same users to vote up or down those translations. To aid in creating the most natural flow and context, this feature allows you to enter a special mode where you can view the site with the proposed translations (and the one with the most current votes) displayed in-context. If you're in this mode, you can then refine a translation even further (or just vote on it) if it doesn't quite fit. As you may have guessed, we're pretty big fans of sites like Wikipedia and Reddit.
But how well did it work?
Well, we weren't quite sure ourselves, at first. Everyone's familiar with the possibility of vandalism on Wikipedia, so we wondered if the same might happen on Facebook - that's why we implemented the voting system - but surely, we thought, our users would want to make sure their own experience on Facebook was a good one. To help them out, we hired professional translators to provide glossaries, style guides, and other materials to support our community translators. And of course, we don't publish the translated versions until we do a quick check of the winning translations ourselves. We even shipped off all the strings to paid translators to have it done professionally just in case.
But Facebook users came through.
Before we were even able to finish implementation of the feature itself, Facebook users using a beta version translated our entire set of strings into Spanish in under a week - well before we received the results back from the paid translators. We weren't even ready on our side to launch the Spanish version of the site, but a few short weeks later, we are proud to have Facebook en Español. Quality is very high - as though the site had been written natively in Spanish. We've found that Facebook users are incredibly passionate about finding just the right wording to express Facebook in their own language.
And so, while we're still polishing off some other issues before we launch the French and German versions of the site (to be followed by even more language options), we're really looking forward to being able to offer Facebook to everyone around the world, written in a way that's tailored just for you, by your friends.
Yishan is a Director of Engineering at Facebook
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Posted: February 14th, 2008, 9:31pm HKT by Yishan Wong