Semana Proxima: Facebook en Español

by Jordan Yerman | February 9, 2008 at 10:52 am

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While not rolling out a whole new version, Facebook is getting retooled to default to Spanish when loading to IP addresses located in Spanish-speaking countries. The work was done using a Facebook app: not bad.

It will not be called "Libro de caras," but on Monday, Spanish will be the default Language for anyone connecting to Facebook from a Spanish-speaking nation.

The task of translating the approximately 40,000 English sentences in the Facebook servers was handled by 1,500 volunteers using the Translations facebook application. In under 4 weeks, enough translation was done for a complete rollout.

French and German are reportedly the next two languages slated for translation. Turkish has not been addressed, despite Turkey being the non-English speaking country accessing Facebook the most.

Facebook reports that over 60% (about 38 of 64 million) of its users are accessing the site from outside of the US. Naturally, though, four of the top ten countries doing this speak English as well (#1 Canada, #2 United Kingdom, #4 Australia, #9 South Africa) so the impetus behind the translation may actually be less to bring in hits from Spanish-speaking nations, and more to address the prodigious Latin American population.