The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than US$15 billion (EU9.5 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 — particularly terms specific to Facebook — that are in tune with local cultures.

“We thought it’d be cool,” said Javier Olivan, universal manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California. “Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Coolness aside, and many users are embracing the notion, other social networks aren’t “crowdsourcing” translation. The move is generating mounting criticism online, where some users question whether amateurs can produce good translations. Critics complain of

sloppiness and skimping, even as Facebook says it is improving service in an innovative way.

The concept of collaborative translation is familiar in open-source programming communities. But Facebook’s effort — as it builds sites in Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch to join versions in Spanish, French and German that launched that year — is among the highest-profile attempts to harness users’ energy to do work traditionally handled by professionals.

The Spanish-language version has taken a specific beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems all through.

Ana B. Torres, a 25-year-old professional translator in Madrid, Spain, called the translation “extremely poor,” citing “outrageous spelling mistakes” such as “ase” instead of “hace” (for “makes” or “does”) and usage of the word “lenguaje” for “language” rather than the unmistaken “idioma.”

Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.

Valentin Macias, 29, a Californian who teaches English in Seoul, South Korea, has…

Orginal post by Top Tech News