“la parole exportée”

This is not a tip. The question is: Who will be making the money, ultimately? And who is working for free, whatever the end-use of their translation?

Facebook has promised to launch localized versions in 2008.

It appears that over 800 translators were working on the Spanish translation, end of December 2007. Read a post by Rodney Rumford, of FacebookReviews, here. Rodney Rumford calls it ‘Crowdsourcing’. What a nice word!

The French tech press is now writing pieces on the subject.

Like this one here.

And this one published today, here.

I will add my own note, published on Facebook. Because my Profile is closed to outsiders, I’m publishing the text below:

Unpaid translation for Facebook

This is an article (unfortunately, in French – for those who don’t master the language) on how Facebook has invited its members to translate Facebook into their own languages.

http://www.infos-du-net.com/actualite/12632-facebook-traduction.html

I found the last paragraph (author’s opinion) particularly eye-catching. Let me translate it for you:

Our opinion: Facebook is turning into a community to the point that they are proposing their users a site made and translated by themselves. The idea is not new, Wikipedia is using a similar system for the translation of its articles. Now our hope is that the proposed translations are complete (sic) and of good quality…

[Source: Notre avis : Facebook devient communautaire au point même de proposer à ses utilisateurs un site fabriqué et traduit par eux-mêmes. L’idée n’est pas nouvelle, Wikipédia fonctionnant sur un système similaire pour la traduction de ses articles, il reste maintenant à espérer que les traductions proposées seront complètes et de qualité...]

As a professional translator, I willingly take unpaid work for CHARITIES, but I find it indecent that a site that handles millions of US$ would have its translation done free of charge by its own members, in order to appear to make them feel involved, when the aim is to attract more French speakers and more advertising money. I know that a lot of people will disagree with me, such is the spirit of Web 2.0. But this blogger’s own opinion is interesting, and not the only one I’ve read so far (this is a recurrent topic in French circles): What about the completeness of the translation, and its quality???

Both are prerequisites for people of different languages to understand each other properly. I researched ‘translation’ on Twitter recently, and found not a few instances of people complaining of poor-quality automatic and/or amateur translation.

End of note

I’ll add to my own note saying that I hope that Facebook will gracefully mention the individual names of all the people (non-Facebook staff) who are participating in the exercise. This is a marketing world, and the free translations are adding VALUE to Facebook.

So for those of you who know French colloquialisms, or would like to learn some, I have this question:

Qui est le dindon de la farce?

(a clue: if you try Systran, you are sure NOT to understand the true meaning, I’ve just checked…)

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under General, Translation, Voluntary Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.