Facebook had a major crowdsourced translation problem!
July 29th, 2010 Leave a comment Visited 1179 times, 4 so far today
Facebook had a major crowdsourced translation problem!
Facebook users using Spanish language edition probably have already noticed this Facebook fiasco.
Some of the language translations were converted into profanities. And these were visible to the end user accessing Facebook through Spanish front-end.
Facebook relies on crowdsourcing for translations so probably some folks decided to vote on incorrect versions to get this working.
Looks like Facebook would have to re-look into the crowdsourcing system for translation. They cannot let this repeat in the future!
For a company that is operating one of the most visited websites in the world, it should not be a problem to have 1-2 dedicated translators who can verify the conversions before they go live on the service.
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Professional translators report about many mistakes found in the translated versions of Facebook. However, converting translations into profanities - that's the limit! Facebook will definitely toughen the voting system they use for the translation quality control. By the way, this project of outsourcing translations was not a money-saver for Facebook. They’ve invested a lot in an application that allows for crowdsourced translation and voting. So, probably, they’ll invest more to improve the application or hire professional translators to verify translations before publication.
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