Although multilingual websites are in general a good thing, kudos to web strategist Jeremiah Owyang for calling social media powerhouse Facebook on its use of “crowdsourcing” rather than professional translation services for the newly released Spanish version of its website (French and German versions are reported to be in the works.) As one comment on Jeremiah’s blog said, “Can’t Facebook afford professional translators or don’t they take non-English speakers seriously enough to think they should spend some money on them?”
Here’s a link to another blog post on the topic, by Nadine Touzet, that offers some additional insights; Nadine points out (and I’d agree with her) that translation of social media tools is even more complex than, say, technical translation, because of the need to convey underlying meanings, slang, cultural connotations, etc. All the more reason for Facebook to read “Translation: Getting it Right.” Unlike a high-quality translation of Facebook, it’s free!
Too true, I was at a seminar last tuesday where the UK Commercial Director of Facebook was giving a speach on how great it was that they got the translation for free and that it was going to be rolled out this way in many more languages.
It is actually worse than it seems as many translators will have worked on each small section and this is then voted on by other translators. So the same text may have been translated by.
The technology used to manage the process is pretty cool – it just needs to reward the translator appropriately.
Having said all this – I am pretty sure this is how Google went multilingual – By asking people to contribute translations. This idea is not so bad for community based projects but these are multi-billion dollar corporations.
Keep up the good blog.
Thanks very much for your comment, this is interesting information. I think it’s also important to point out that volunteer translation is not in itself a bad idea at all. For example, Translate.org.za has produced some amazing translations and localizations into African languages, largely using volunteer translators. However, the projects are managed by professionals and the translators are trained. In addition, various Internet sources have estimated Facebook’s net worth at US$15 billion (based on Microsoft’s $240 million equity stake being referred to as a “1.6% stake”), an amount that would lead one to believe that they could afford professional translation/localization services… Glad you’re enjoying the blog, thanks for your input!