Facebook Seeks User Aid for Free Translations

The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, seems to have 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, California. "Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook."

Coolness aside, and many users are embracing the idea, other social networks aren't "crowdsourcing" translation. 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". Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.

Among the hottest debates so far has been over "poke" – Facebook's term for giving someone a playful nudge. In Spanish, it became "dar un toque." In French, "faire un signe." And in German, "anstupsen". Japanese translators couldn't find an equivalent so they decided to go with the original English.

Valentin Macias, 29, a Californian who teaches English in Seoul, South Korea, has volunteered in the past to translate for the nonprofit Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia but said he won't do it for Facebook.

"Wikipedia is a charitable, information-sharing, donation-supported cause," Macias claims. "Facebook is not. Therefore, people should not be tricked into donating their time and energy to a multimillion-dollar company so that the company can make millions more – at least not without some type of compensation."

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.

"If the goal is to save money, we're doing the wrong thing, because we are basically spending our most valuable asset, which is engineering time," he said, adding that Facebook relishes being different from competitors and that users are helping the company produce versions in numerous languages as quickly as possible.

Just 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.

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, which has 200 million registered users worldwide and 29 country-specific and regional sites, with more on the way. In fact, MySpace India was launched just a couple of days ago.