Users around the world translate Facebook for free

TOKYO -- The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion (euro9.5 billion) by many estimates, got a good deal on going global.

Its users around the world are translating Facebook's visible framework into nearly two dozen languages — for free — aiding the company's aggressive expansion to better serve the 60% of its 69 million users who live outside the United States.

The company says it's using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines — especially terms specific to Facebook — that are in tune with local cultures.

"We thought it'd be cool," said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California. "Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook."

Coolness aside, and many users are embracing the idea, other social networks aren't "crowdsourcing" translation. The move is generating mounting criticism online, where some users question whether amateurs can produce good translations. Critics complain of sloppiness and skimping, even as Facebook says it is improving service in an innovative way.

The concept of collaborative translation is familiar in open-source programming communities. But Facebook's effort — as it builds sites in Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch to join versions in Spanish, French and German that launched this year — is among the highest-profile attempts to harness users' energy to do work traditionally handled by professionals.

The Spanish-language version has taken a particular beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems throughout.

Ana B. Torres, a 25-year-old professional translator in Madrid, Spain, called the translation "extremely poor," citing "outrageous spelling mistakes" such as "ase" instead of "hace" (for "makes" or "does") and usage of the word "lenguaje" for "language" rather than the correct "idioma."

Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.