In January of 2008, Facebook enlisted its almost two hundred million users to help translate the popular social networking site into over seventy languages. About three hundred thousand users answered the call, and made Facebook more accessible for those who live outside of the States (by Facebook estimates, about 70% of current users live overseas).

The translations were done through an application which presents users with a short underlined phrase, for which the user either votes for an existing user-generated translation or submits one of his own. Final decisions were made by Facebook editors and developers.

Last September, Facebook introduced Translations for Facebook Connect, which allows other websites to enlist the help of Facebook members in translating website content. A visitor to the translated site would then log in with his Facebook username and password, and be able to view the website’s content in his native language.

Following the Wikipedia model of ‘crowdsourcing,’ with this translation tool Facebook uses sheer numbers of editors in an attempt to produce the best possible results. Ethan Beard, head of platform technology at Facebook, believes the Facebook method far superior to mechanized translations: “[…] 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.”

The Facebook method of translation has proved popular, with Twitter about to adopt a similar program (assisted by in-house translators). In an age of increasing technology, Facebook has made a bold statement that language will never be able to be produced without people.

This post references a New York Times article dated September 29, 2009.

This application serves to provide translations of particular phrases used throughout the site. These phrases have been translated by the users, and then votes are collected on which translation is the most accurate. The highest-ranking translation is then utilized on the actual site…

As reported by Cade Metz of The Register, when the app was first introduced, it produced a Spanish-language Facebook in only two weeks. Following the Spanish translation, a French Facebook was produced in only 24 hours. Today, the social networking behemoth has come out with yet another an addition to the connect program, which purports to ease the translation of any website.

Read Cade Metz’s full article on The Register here: Facebook turns users into web translation engine