A Spanish-language version of social-networking giant Facebook will launch on Monday.
The change will be immediately obvious to the roughly 2.8 million Facebook members in Spain and Latin America because the Spanish-language home page will be the default page shown to internet users accessing the site from a Spanish-speaking country.
Any user will be able to choose between the English or Spanish interface in their account settings.
Versions in German and French are promised for the coming weeks, the company said in a statement.
To translate the site the company used its own social-networking skills and turned to its users.
A Facebook-translation application was created that allowed users to submit their own translations while browsing the site. The translations were then approved by the community, which was about 1,500 people strong. The entire effort took about a month and ended up with phrases like "dar un toque" as the Spanish version of Facebook-speak "poke".
Facebook said it will soon open up the translation application to developers so that they can harness the power of the community to translate their own applications.
See also:
The 20 most notable Facebook apps
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Comments
JP said: Facebook took a long time to finish this important task to open their platform massively to spanish-speaking usersIn the meanwhile diffent social networks have been working hard to get the attention of those users and communitiesAn example of it its Sonicocom wwwsonicocom that in less than 6 month from the first release have registered more than 7 million hispanic members and gaining an average of 100k new daily to become the biggest and fastest spanish social networkBut the question here is beyond this topicIs this Facebooks move enough to get new hispanic usersI dont think soObviously this will help and probably a new wave of members will join but to get the mass network effect they will need to work hard and not only relay to users workforce to adapt their strategy for this new market Also some other core releases and along term commitment is needed in order to adapt the site to the idiosyncrasy of latam and spanish speaking users