Monday, May 19, 2008
Facebook gets translated, saves a ton of money
Booming social networking site Facebook has managed to get its entire interface ready to go in Japanese at what must have been a fraction of the cost of using professional translation services for the entire process. This article (in Japanese) tells how they added Japanese to the list of nine languages available for the interface:
日本語への翻訳はFacebookユーザーがボランティアで行ったのち、Facebookとプロの翻訳者がチェックした。Facebook上で利用できる専用の翻訳アプリケーションを利用し、430人が3週間かけて約1500文を訳した。訳文の選択は投票によって決められるという「民主的なプロセス」で行った。
To sum up: Facebook added a “translation application” to its services. Users could sign up to use this app and start providing their glosses for the various bits of the interface—the “click here for XX” and “last updated on YY” and other little chunks of text that guide you around the website. A group of 430 users made their way through the 1,500 or so phrases, translating them into Japanese, over the course of three weeks, voting on the best options when there were more than one. At the end of this “democratic process” the site operators had a pro translator (translators?) look over everything before signing off on the new language.
With Google trying to get users to improve its automated translation tool and Facebook throwing the gates open to the masses in this way, it looks like the “getting people to do the grunt work for free” approach is becoming a popular one, at least among large Internet operations with a broad international user base. Just call what you do a community effort and away you go.
(If you’re on the site, feel free to add me, assuming I got my URL right there.)