Facebook goes Spanish just five months ago. After that launching, the internationalization team and its community translators are working out to translate the site into sixteen more languages. Facebook is now on French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. The language can be easily changed using the language selector found in the footer of the page.
Facebook caters to all users around the world and some of the users have difficulties understanding English. With the language selector, users who have difficulties understanding in English are helped. Thousands of people offered their hands to help translate Facebook into more than the sixteen released languages and the other eight in the process.
55 new languages are in line for translation by the community. Facebook opens new translations on languages such as additional Asian languages, African dialects, regional varieties like the British English and Canadian French, and even infrequently spoken languages like Latin and Esperanto.
As Facebook goes multilingual, it is opening a bigger door to more users especially to those with difficulties in English. It gives users a better access to the site knowing that they are familiar with the language being used. Though, problems will really occur when they are taking this big leap. One of this will be the inaccurate translation. Some languages do not have the exact words that can equal the meaning of the word. This can lead to confusion in the users’ side.
Friendster goes multilingual also. As the number of people joining social networking sites is increasing, it is best that it caters almost every user’s needs. As a social networking site, you don’t just cater to a specific race but to all. Later on, we will not just see these sites with limited language translations but with all the language translations and maybe hoping for local dialects as well.