Back in January 2008, Facebook was available in one language: English. That’s when the company introduced a new translation tool that allowed its members to do the hard work of translating the site into their native languages. As a result, Facebook is now available in 65 languages, and a majority of its users are overseas.
On Thursday, Facebook will make that translation tool available to other sites. The new program is called Translations for Facebook Connect, and it is being offered to the 15,000 sites and applications that use the Connect service, which allows visitors to log in using their Facebook ID and password and broadcast some information back to their friends on the social network.
The translation tool works by asking users to submit possible translations of phrases, and then soliciting their votes on which is the most accurate. So now a country’s tourism Web site, for example, can use the tool to solicit help with a translation, and then present the site to users in their native language when they log in using their Facebook ID. It is free for developers, but Facebook hopes it will increase the use of the Connect Service.
Facebook’s human-powered approach juxtaposes quite sharply with Google’s service, which uses technology to automatically translate Web sites and text — with occasional unintentionally comical results. (The Facebook system, of course, has had to handle a relatively tiny number of phrases.)
“Other businesses try to accomplish the same thing using technology to solve these problems, and it’s not always 100 percent accurate,” said Ethan Beard, head of platform at Facebook, in a veiled reference to Google. “But technology doesn’t take into account cultural values, idioms that are hard to translate. In the same way we think reviews are better when they come from friends, translation done by people is significantly better than what you would get otherwise.”
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