Facebook’s Crowdsourced Spanish Translations - “Wisdom of the Crowd” or “Dumbness of the Crowd”?

According to Wikipedia, “Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.”

Regarding Facebook’s Spanish translation, web marketing expert Jeremiah Owyang has just posted a video on his blog aptly enough titled: “Facebook’s Spanish Translation Misses the Mark“.

He interviews Maria and Aaron Contente, who are both native Spanish speakers from Mexico, educated, and are successful professionals in Silicon Valley. Not surprisingly, the conclusion is: “… the new version reads awkward… in some cases there’s no substitute for having a professional translator.” (Well, as they say, “you get what you pay for!” I don’t like cliches but I just couldn’t resist this one

Anyway, I think the best thing to do is just to visit Jeremiah’s blog and watch the video. And then, if you know Spanish, you can go to the Facebook Spanish version. Will you come back here and share your opinion?

More on Crowdsourcing: Read/Write Web and Kathy Sierra’s “The Dumbness of the Crowd“

I must say I prefer the MySpace approach to Translation/localization, even though I am a heavy Facebook user and there is a Translator Power group and also The Global Expert group on Facebook (English Version

A.M.Sall

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