FaceBook's 'Citizen-Generated Translations'

Yesterday, I posted about Luis Rull who has started a Spanish to English translation service for bloggers. As I have written, I consider language to remain among the stickiest barriers of all people being able to have conversations and it is a subject that interests me.

This morning KD Paine pointed me to this WebProNews post of how Facebook is enabling user-generated translation services. While WebProNews focuses on the fact that it is free to the provider, that is of no concern to me.  I find citizen-generated translation it a promising move. Luis may have competition on the Facebook front. There are already over 800 Spanish translations on some Facebook content. The issues immediately become objectivity and accuracy.

To do their jobs, translators need to be absolutely neutral on content. There job is simply to let people of varied tongues understand each other. When I spoke in Spain recently, I received a question in Spanish, that some may have considered controversial. My translator would simply not tell me what had been asked.

I am for most citizen-generated activities. I think glitches tend to work themselves out. Perhaps, Facebook's new citizen-generated translations can start working like Wikipedia, where one translation keeps getting edited and refined until most knowledgeable parties agree on the content.

What I like most, is the number of places where I see efforts being made to translate one language into another in social media so that more people can tlk to more people.

Comments

[Justin Thorp]

Too bad the app is down...

In Mashable's article:
http://mashable.com/2007/12/27/facebook-translations/

They said the URL was http://facebook.com/translations

That doesn't work now. It would've been fun to poke around the app.

[Matt]

We've experimented with this for a bit now:

http://translate.wordpress.com/rankings.php

The biggest problem is consistency, and we only have 3,000 strings. At some point I still think you need a human in the process overseeing the entire project, like an editor.