I wrote a few months ago about Facebook’s translation initiative launched to get Facebook translated into many, if not all, languages around the world. I was in a meeting with Don Tapscott the other day and he mentioned a talk he had with the top Facebook people who told him a bit more about their experience with the translating application so far.
They started with the Spanish translation which was finished in less than a month by about 1,500 volunteers – since then it’s had around 8,594 translators and 66,274 translations submitted. It has been so popular that Facebook has introduced translations for specific Spanish locales like Spain, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela…The German translation was next and took less than two weeks with around 2,000 contributors. The French translation of Facebook took a few days to complete and involved close to 10,000 people! A total of 67,445 translations have been submitted so far.

There are currently 63 languages open for translation on Facebook and they will be adding translation capability for languages that read from right-to-left such as Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Now that’s pretty impressive, how much money and how much time do you think it would have taken if Facebook had hired a person, or even a team of people to translate their site into French or Spanish (let’s not even start thinking about 63 languages).