Facebook has been translated into three new languages — and it has its users to thank.
Be it "what's on your mind?" or the "like" or "share" buttons, a dedicated community of Facebook users want to make sure all the words and phrases on the social networking service are accurately translated into their native tongues.
In all, Facebook is now available in 101 languages with the addition on Friday of Maltese (the official language of Malta that has more than 400,000 native speakers), Pulaar (a dialect of Fula spoken by more than 7 million across West and Central Africa), and Corsican (spoken by some 200,000 people and listed on UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger).
Human-powered translation is critical to Facebook's growth. More than 1 billion of the 1.7 billion people who use Facebook speak a language other than English.
That number undoubtedly will increase as more people connect to the Internet."As the number of languages grow, the number of people on Facebook also grow," Iris Orriss, Facebook's director of internationalization, told USA TODAY.
The goal: to eventually translate Facebook into all the languages requested by Facebook users. More than 40 more languages currently are in the process of being translated.
"A lot of passionate people feel strongly about having Facebook in their language," Orriss says.
Among them: Vannina Bernard-Leoni, who two years ago leaped into action after learning that Facebook was being translated into Breton, spoken in the Brittany region of France.
"Corsican people thought, 'If Facebook can be translated into Breton, why not in Corsican?' " says Bernard-Leoni, director of innovation and development at Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli.
She gathered six students to begin translating English into Corsican. Soon hundreds joined in and ultimately a couple thousand, all tapping into the broader movement to save the Corsican language.
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