Facebook Opts For Crowdsourcing, Raises Hackles
The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.
Its users around the world are translating Facebook’s visible framework into nearly two dozen languages — for free — aiding the company’s aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the United States.
The company says it’s using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines — especially terms specific to Facebook — that are in tune with local cultures.
However crowdsourcing, for Facebook, is coming with its own set of problems, with some users questioning whether amateurs can produce good translations – the Spanish-language version, for instance, has taken a particular beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems throughout, and others claiming that Facebook is taking advantage of free labour.
Facebook however denies it, pointing out that it has spent considerable resources building the translation program. [Via]
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