Help Translate Facebook. Into English

I just saw an interesting message on Facebook asking me if I wanted to help translate it so that people around the world can understand it better. The language they wanted help with? English (UK).

I can’t say that I’ve noticed that many instances of Facebook using annoying American spellings for things (and to my American friends, sorry, but they are annoying – we gave you our most prized possession, our language, and look what you did to it). Facebook obviously thinks that there is a need to improve things.

It seems like the translation programme is run as a Facebook app, and is actually already complete (see the screenshot below). It’s gone 6 on a Friday afternoon so I haven’t really played around with it yet but will let you know what is involved in helping them translate new phrases.

What I will say is that I think that asking the great British public to help set the language for the site is very brave – we aren’t best known for taking things too seriously and I’d officially like to start a campaign to get the word bumfluff added to Facebook as a translation for something else. If anyone else is helping out with this project and would like to join my noble quest, please let me know.

11 comments

  1. How trusting of them. It’s a good thing Britain doesn’t have any funny slang terms that Americans don’t immediately recognise or understand that you could slip in there, isn’t it? Imagine what could happen.

    /adds Translate application/

  2. I note they didn’t tell you in which language they wanted to translate Facebook. In my case, I was actually invited to “help translate Facebook into English”: Please Help Translate Facebook into English

    As a way of replying to Jane: “It’s a good thing Britain doesn’t have any funny slang terms that Americans don’t immediately recognise or understand that you could slip in there”

    – I had the pleasure (in a proper sense of the word) of meeting two Canadians, father and son, in my city this Saturday. The father is originally from Stockport/Swansea. Well, in the middle the talk it turned out that the son couldn’t understand the meaning of “gammon”. In my turn, I found out that in Canada they call it “ham”. It’s not exactly slang, but still…

  3. hi thanks alot but wat i realy one is for the mesages wich come to my box 4rm facebook to be in english cuz the language wich it usualy comes i dont understand it so it will be better if it comes in english cuz i dont understand other language but english.
    thanks for understanding me.
    hope my reguest will be granted.
    bye.

  4. Just a quick note to anyone who finds this post.

    I DON’T WORK FOR FACEBOOK AND WILL THEREFORE NOT BE ABLE TO HELP IF YOU’RE NOT GETTING CONTENT IN THE LANGUAGE YOU WANT.

    If you’re having problems it might be worth checking your account settings and getting in touch with facebook directly.

  5. sign in to your facebook account, scroll down, go to lower right corner you will see:
    facebook © 2010 ‘ English(US)

    Just click the ” English(US) ” then select your language, thats all..

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