Another great idea from Facebook:

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=308

Facebook is working on this application internally - Facebook Translations:

http://www.facebook.com/translations/

“The Translations application by Facebook allows translators all over the world to translate Facebook into different languages. Join our community of translators and make Facebook available to everyone, everywhere, in all languages.

Currently the Facebook Translations Application is limited to beta users only. We’ll let you know when the application is available for you to use. “

It’s a really interesting idea. I am sure Facebook will pull it off nicely.
Now it’s time for translation to meet social graph.

Facebook not only can use this to translate their own applications, but also offer services to 3rd party apps - those money-hungry individual Facebook app developers. It’s a great value-add, and another good reason to grow with Facebook.

Here is my idea of Social Translation:

1. Push content to social graph

2. Filter it through social translation process

3. Evaluate it through social review process

4. Validate it through professional proofreading service (optional - depending on sensitivity of content)

5. Push to live

* Please note that I left out any engineering effort - I18N, L10n, QA, etc.

Gotta watch this:

http://developers.facebook.com/videos.php

I watched this video right after F8, and was fascinated by their innovative socialgraph idea.

Opening up their platform attracted many talented developers in the world to build their own apps on FB.

A win-win strategy for both, and the innovative idea paid off big time!

WSJ 12/20/2007

http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20071220/with-online-services-foreign-texts-can-get-lost-in-translation/

It looks like machine translation is still far from conquering human translation
In my previous MT attempts on google, it was definitely not enough for interpreting professional & sophisticated documents, but it was more than enough for short and simple text. It would be awesome if FB uses MT to translate multilingual wall posts on the fly.

Here is my first FB app, but as far as the number of users registered, it is not doing very well… I think it lacks some fun factors, and I decided not to update this app anymore. I have already started a new app and will be ready soon.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4799981940

Using this application, you can write stories, ideas and knowledge in your languages to the world. Users who do not know your languages can also read your writings once your stories are translated to their languages, or through Google Translate. This means you can also read stories that are written in other languages, for instance, Nepali, Arabic and so forth.

I created this application hoping that it will bring the world a little bit closer by giving users chances to share their stories to the world and also learn from the world.

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- Here are some things you can do with Global Footprints:

1. Step on your friends.

If you step on a friend, your friend will get a message in Mini-Feed in his/her profile. It is a way to communicate with your friends.

2. Step on a friend with a message.

You can leave footprints to your friends with messages that you wrote or someone else wrote that you think your friend might also be interested in.

3. Read stories from the world.

4. Write stories, ideas, and knowledge to the world.

5. Translate those you like to the world yourself, or through Google Translate.

6. Write comments on footprints.

7. Rate footprints.

Enjoy!

1. Download PEAR i18n package to your local machine

http://pear.php.net/packages.php?catpid=28&catname=Internationalization

2. Upload it to your server

3. Add the library path to php include_path using ini_set:

ini_set (”include_path”, “.:/www/facebook/pear:/usr/local/php5/lib/php”);

4. Use it

//loading PEAR I18Nv2
require_once ‘I18Nv2.php’;
require_once ‘I18Nv2/Locale.php’;
require_once ‘I18Nv2/Language.php’;

$i18nv2_lang = &new I18Nv2_Language($locale, ‘UTF-8′);
$i18nv2_locale = &I18Nv2::createLocale($locale);

- Getting translated language names

foreach ($i18nv2_lang->codes as $lang_code => $lang_translated) {
…
}

- Getting formatted date & time

$fdate= $i18nv2_locale->formatDate($time, I18Nv2_DATETIME_MEDIUM) ;
$ftime = $i18nv2_locale->formatTime($time, I18Nv2_DATETIME_MEDIUM);

It is happening now… Looking forward to seeing how innovative they can be in terms of making this fascinating socialgraph all work for all the languages in the world  

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/08/06/coming-soon-facebook-in-your-language/