Facebook En Español: Website Translations Targeting Spanish-Speakers

Since its release in the early nineties, the internet has been dominated by English. Although English continues to be the prevalent language for communication on the web, the increased influence of Spanish-speaking populations throughout the world is forcing businesses to translate their websites into Spanish in order to gain access to the lucrative Hispanic market. A key example of this initiative is undoubtedly the recent release of a Spanish version of Facebook, a popular social networking site, which used an innovative model to translate its website into Spanish.

Facebook is a social networking site originally started in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate as a means to help his fellow students communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers.  In the past four years, it has expanded to a social utility valued at several billion dollars with 64 million active users worldwide. It is estimated that 2.8 million active users lives in Spain and Latin America. Naturally, Facebook released the Spanish version of its site in February as a step to further its influence in these regions. This new version enables Spanish-speakers everywhere to sign up and browse the site in their native language. Using a community-based translation model, Facebook used input from 1,500 Spanish-speaking users to translate the site from English to Spanish in less than four weeks.

After English and Chinese, Spanish is the third most common language spoken by the online population. Thus, it is not surprising that Facebook along with numerous other popular social network sites, community sites, blog sites, and news sites have turned to translation in order to target the Spanish-speaking populations of the world. As a result, the advent of website translations is making progress to ensure that Hispanics worldwide have access to the internet community in a language they can understand.

By Karina Lairet