Found in Translation

Friends with Translation Benefits
When you write on someone’s wall, accept a friend request, or update your
timeline, you probably don’t think for a second about translation. Yet,
translation has played a critical role in Facebook’s history—and continues to
fuel its ongoing global expansion. As of late 2011, there were more than eight
hundred million users of Facebook. In a world of seven billion people, that
means that more than one in every ten people is a member of the world’s
largest social network. That kind of global growth doesn’t just happen by
accident.
Back in 2007, Facebook started trying out an experimental method of
translation. It decided to engage the crowd, to allow its users to determine how
they would like to see the site translated into their languages. Facebook users
rallied in support of the cause. Within just a couple of weeks of starting the
effort, they launched the first language, Spanish. Envision a tiny snowball at the
top of the mountain. Users responded with positive feedback, so the company
opened up its crowdsourcing platform to enable users to translate the site into
French and German. Imagine the snowball beginning to roll down the
mountain.
The following year, 2008, was the year of internationalization at Facebook.
“One can argue that translations contributed the most growth,” explains
Ghassan Haddad, director of internationalization at Facebook.
13
He notes that

---

the number of users in Italy skyrocketed following the launch of the Italian
language, jumping from 375,000 to 933,000 in just four months. In France,
during the three months following the release, the number jumped from 1.4
million to 2.4 million users. “This growth story was repeated in almost all
locales,” Haddad points out. But the growth was not just limited to the countries
themselves. Speakers of French living in other countries also began joining
Facebook as a result of the newly translated version. And so began the
avalanche.
Facebook is currently available in seventy-seven languages, including U.S.
English, and another thirty languages are in various phases of translation
progress. The currently available languages represent over 90 percent of the
world population and over 95 percent of people with access to the Internet. The
company has continued to tap into its user base to produce the translated
versions of its website. Facebook’s crowdsourced translation model has since
served as an example for many hundreds of organizations throughout the
world, including various nonprofits and charitable organizations. In fact, there
are now entire companies that make money from setting up such online
communities and paying professional translators to provide the translations
through these portals. “Since our users are major stakeholders and partners in
the translation, the launchability of additional languages depends greatly on
their involvement,” Haddad observes. For example, in October 2011, a small
group of Khmer speakers expressed deep interest in having Facebook in their
language and began working extensively toward that goal. Just two months
later, Facebook was officially launched in Khmer.
Of course, Facebook does not rely exclusively on volunteer translators to
produce all its content in other languages. Approximately thirty languages are
supported by professional (paid) translation providers. When professional
translators originally learned that Facebook was using volunteers to do some
of its translation work, they were outraged at first. They worried that it
threatened their business model and that it would result in poor quality. The
opposite happened. Not only was the quality high but the initial work of the
volunteers led to paid translation work that otherwise would not have existed.
But the challenges of managing all of the translated versions of the website
extend far beyond just language. “Keeping all parts of the site translated at all
times is a very challenging task, due to the fact that Facebook development
moves very quickly,” Haddad explains. “During crunch times, it’s not unusual
to see a churn of approximately ten percent or more of the site content in a
single week.”
Not only do Haddad and his team have to make sure that the translation is

---

ready at the same time as the launch of the English version, but they have to
mitigate security risks as well. They also have to maintain their own
proprietary translation application, which enables their nonvolunteer
translation team members—both in-house and contract based—to collaborate
in real time.
For the community-translated languages, it’s no easy undertaking for
Facebook to manage such an enormous crowd of volunteers. Haddad and his
team have to measure what parts of the site are most visible to users,
warranting the earliest attention, and they have to direct translators to the user
interface for those parts of the site. They also have to maintain a controlled
environment to guard against people who might not be translating for the right
reasons. “Over half a million users have contributed to translations on
Facebook,” he explains. “But there are hundreds, if not thousands of
individuals who are there to produce everything from silly translations to
downright malicious ones.” Some users even attempt to sabotage the
translations by typing in obscenities and ethnic slurs, so the environment
Facebook has created must control the problems before they get out of hand.
Of course, even the best monitor at the high school gymnasium can’t prevent
the kids from pulling silly pranks. A group of Turkish Facebook users decided
to replace several common phrases in Facebook with some “creatively”
translated versions. For example, the Facebook chat notification “Your
message could not be sent because the user is offline” was translated as:
Mesajın gönderilemedi çünkü penisin çok küçük, which means “Your message
could not be sent because you have a tiny penis.”
What did Facebook users in Turkey think when this message suddenly
appeared? They got a kick out of it, according to eighteen-year-old Facebook
user Nuri Turkoglu. “That actually happened to one of my friends, not to me
personally. But when we found out about it, we just laughed. It was hilarious,”
he shared. Turkoglu began using Facebook in Turkish, his native language,
when he was in tenth grade in Turkey. But after spending time attending high
school in the United States, he now interacts with friends online in English, too.
Though the languages are easy to navigate through Facebook’s interface,
cultural differences are still prominent. Turkoglu, a dual citizen of Turkey and
the United States, points out that Americans and Turks use Facebook in very
different ways: “Turkish people like to socialize and share more photos and
videos with comments than Americans do.” He also notices that the two
cultures behave differently when using Facebook instant messaging.
“Americans tend to write using plain text. It feels like you’re just reading text
from a book when chatting with them,” he says. “Turks use more emoticons to

---

express their feelings, which makes it much easier to understand what they are
really trying to communicate.”
14
Facebook’s stated mission is to make the world more open and connected.
How does translation make it happen? As Haddad from Facebook remarks,
“Language is the most critical enabler of communication. Without translation,
connecting the world simply isn’t possible.” Even bilingual Facebook users
like Turkoglu, who don’t rely completely on translation but still use it to
interact with friends in more than one language, would tend to agree.