The Social

So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.

It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.

This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas amid allegations that its traffic has plateaued. Facebook, for example, saw significant growth overseas when it started launching user-translated versions of its site.

To better inform the Twittering masses, we have gone to the trouble of plugging the term "fail whale" into Google Translate to see how you say it in Spanish. That didn't go too well with the algorithm, so we tried "whale of failure" and came out with "la ballena de fracaso." Unfortunately, that just doesn't have the same ring.

But this is not actually the first time that Twitter has toyed with launching a non-English edition. Last year, Twitter board member Joi Ito hyped up the launch of a standalone Twitter Japan site, powered by an investment from Ito's Digital Garage, that was notable because it was ad-supported (Twitter still hasn't rolled out ads or even said that it will for sure).

Biz Stone filled in CNET News on the status of Twitter Japan via e-mail on Tuesday night: "(It's) doing very well. A few of us were there a few weeks ago to launch a brand new mobile service. We had a really fun tweetup in Tokyo."

Twitter hasn't said what the next translations of its site will be, though presumably they'd pick a language that's already spoken by many users or one spoken in a region where it hopes to make big inroads. Or they could just be cutesy and launch in Klingon or Pirate.

This post was updated at 10:40 p.m. with comment from Biz Stone.

So just how do you say "poke" in Latin? It's "puncti," according to Facebook's newest language translation. The supposedly "dead" language--O.K., so the Others on "Lost" speak it sometimes--debuted as an official translation on the social network on Friday.

"Latin has joined the more than 70 languages we've made available on the site in the past two years, including some which have launched just today--Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali," a post on the company blog by Facebook's Elizabeth Linder read. "Some of these are languages that millions of people speak across the globe. Others are dialects that specific communities use in select geographic areas. Still others are just for fun: 'Pirate' may not appeal to everyone, but for those nostalgic for the days of Blackbeard and Captain Hook, it's there for you."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg notably studied both ancient Greek and Latin in high school; interviews have said that when he enrolled at Harvard, which he ended up dropping out of to run Facebook full-time, he considered studying classics rather than computer science.

Most of Facebook's translations have been "crowdsourced" by users. Latin was a volunteer effort, too, according to the blog post, which must have been quite the operation considering the likes of Cicero and Ovid probably didn't use the term "news feed" colloquially.

"To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language," Linder's post wrote. "While students of 'living languages' practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto."

Conveniently, that ubiquitous Facebook term "status" is the same in English and in Latin.

Facebook made a dual set of announcements this week pertaining to Facebook Connect, the universal-log-in product that it offers to third-party developers and Web sites. Both are aimed at making Connect more ubiquitous: first, a tool called "Translations for Facebook Connect" that simplifies the process of translating the product into international languages, and second, the "Facebook Connect Wizard" for incorporating the product into a site with little developer expertise required.

Facebook first announced that Connect would be available in a multilingual format this summer. Now, the tool can be used to translate any site into the language of a given user who's logged in with Connect.

Last we heard, about 15,000 sites had implemented Facebook Connect, a product that statistics firm Hitwise says gave the social network enough momentum to propel it past once-bigger rival MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic. Launching international translations of the main Facebook site--which the company ended up "crowdsourcing" to users starting early last year--is largely credited with kickstarting the social network's growth overseas.

Facebook now has over 300 million active users around the world, a sizable majority of which are outside the U.S.

"Establishing a presence on the social Web requires fundamental building blocks," a post by Facebook employee Alex Himel explained as it announced the Facebook Connect Wizard. "Facebook provides these essential tools, including identity for a great registration system, and immediate access to 300 million active global users. Facebook Connect gives entrepreneurs of all sizes--and with varying developer resources--the ability to build traffic efficiently through reaching a relevant audience, while offering an engaging user experience."

The new Connect Wizard takes only three steps, Himel's post said.

Facebook announced Tuesday in a post on its developer blog that Facebook Connect--its universal-login product used by more than 15,000 third-party sites--is now available in an array of international languages.

"Developers who've implemented Facebook Connect, including those who have installed social widgets like the Fan Box, now have the ability to decide in which language they want their Facebook Connect features rendered," the post by Facebook's James Lezsczenski read. "When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify. User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written."

Facebook, which now has more than 250 million members around the world, began launching international translations of its site early last year, encouraging users to help translate the social-networking service into their native languages. This is when Facebook's growth around the world really started to speed up.

Social network Hi5 has launched a site translation project, a week after the announcement that the company had created a "crowdsourced translation" app for use on the OpenSocial developer platform and several months after it initially announced plans for translation.

The site is now available not only in American English and the two dozen languages that Hi5 had previously translated it into (not through community efforts), but now also in Catalan, Danish, British English, Finnish, Hindi, Macedonian, Slovakian, Mexican Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Swedish. These translations were generated by community participation and verified by translation service Lionbridge. Later in October, Hi5 plans to launch translated versions of the site in Albanian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, French, Maltese, Norwegian, Serbian, and several other Spanish dialects.

"The power of this program to deliver localized versions of our product has exceeded our own high expectations," founder and CEO Ramu Yalamanchi said in a release. "It is amazing to see the energy and enthusiasm of our global user community in action, taking our site into new languages and geographies that we otherwise wouldn't have the resources to address."

Hi5 is headquartered in San Francisco, but a plurality of its 56 million users come from Latin American countries.

This post was updated at 1:19 p.m. PT to note the number of languages into which Hi5 is already translated.

Social network Hi5 plans to announce on Thursday that it has built a developer application with the Google-created OpenSocial standard that "crowdsources" language translation.

This makes it possible for OpenSocial-compatible social networks or applications to let their users work to translate a site or application's text and interface into more languages, in turn making it easier for the service to have broader geographic reach. The translation app will be implemented on Hi5, a social network that was founded in San Francisco but is most popular in Spanish-speaking countries, as well as its own developer platform, and is open for more developers to use as well through OpenSocial.

Hi5's own site is already available in two dozen languages.

One big player in the social-app space that plans to use Hi5's translation code is iLike, a music service that has become popular largely through applications for platforms from Facebook to Apple's iTunes, and hopes to see its user base distributed around the world as well as across the Web. Another is RockYou, the "app factory" behind some of the most popular applications created with the Facebook and OpenSocial standards.

"As the leading music provider on hi5, we're excited to know that hi5's crowdsourcing service would expand iLike's reach internationally, helping music spread among fans from different languages, geographies and cultures," iLike CEO Ali Partovi said in a release.

The concept of crowdsourcing language translations caught fire when Facebook started enlisting volunteer members to help with the effort through an application on its own platform called Translation. The Hi5 application will, in effect, do the same thing for the OpenSocial platform.

Google built OpenSocial as a universal standard for social-network applications, and has since gained the following of almost every social site except for Facebook, which continues to use its own platform. Earlier this year, OpenSocial was spun off into a nonprofit organization separate from Google.

UPDATE: Google representatives informed CNET News.com on Thursday that this "internal issue with Google Translate" has been fixed.

Gawker has unearthed a rather odd bug in the Google Translate software: its English-to-Spanish translator converts the name of the actor Heath Ledger, who died tragically on Tuesday, to the name of another actor--Tom Cruise. So if you enter in "I will miss Heath Ledger," Google Translate will come back with "Voy a perder Tom Cruise."

This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the world. It only affects the English-to-Spanish translation; translations from English into other languages leave "Heath Ledger" intact, and "Tom Cruise" remains "Tom Cruise" in a Spanish-to-English translation. And the bug only appears to apply to the name "Heath Ledger," as substituting a number of other actors' names (Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Jake Gyllenhaal) also fails to yield "Tom Cruise."

It'd all be pretty funny were it not for the terrible circumstances surrounding Ledger, 28, who was found dead after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills; there's nothing tasteless about it, thankfully, but cracking jokes or hinting at Scientology conspiracies just doesn't seem all that fitting. We've contacted Google for comment. But we're guessing that this won't be a very pressing issue for Mountain View.

As has been long expected, Facebook has begun to work on making its service available in multiple languages as it expands internationally--and it's doing so by utilizing the power of its millions of users by enlisting them to volunteer a few minutes. The site has spent the past few weeks asking international users to participate in the process by installing a "Translation" application that lets them translate words on Facebook from English to their native languages. It only applies, of course, to Facebook-generated text; anything entered by users, like interests or favorite movies, remain as-is.

The Translation application is initially available in French, Spanish, and German, and Facebook has said that thousands of users have enlisted in the process and are "actively translating."

But it's more complicated than that: "This doesn't mean that once a user has finished translating the site will be available in that language," a release from Facebook explained. "In order to get the best possible quality translations, we have a voting system. Other translators of that language will be able to vote on the quality of the translation by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Users are also able to report any poor translations or translators." Essentially, Facebook has prank-proofed the system.

Full versions of Facebook in French, Spanish, and German will be available, ideally, before the end of March; when those are complete, the next set of languages (which have yet to be determined) will enter the translation process.

A handful of other social networks already offer a variety of languages based either on personal preference or geographic location. Friendster, which is popular in Asia, allows its users to toggle back and forth between English and Chinese; MySpace operates more than a dozen international sites with both language and content targeted toward the culture in question.

The Financial Times reported on Sunday that Facebook is working to make its rabidly popular social-networking site available in languages other than English. It's been known for quite some time that translation has been on the company's radar as it expands beyond its U.S. roots--executives have mentioned it amorphously in speeches and panels--so there is very little "real news" here other than the fact that the Financial Times story indicates that there may be evidence that this translation project is a major priority.

Nevertheless, Facebook has been unclear about timing, and has not released any kind of official "coming soon" teaser like it has with the advent of custom profiles.

Add this to the fact that we have heard rumors that Facebook has quietly plastered some fliers around the Stanford University campus asking for student volunteers to help with translation efforts in various languages.

Facebook still lags behind rival MySpace in internationally-targeted features: the News Corp.-owned social-networking site operates more than a dozen region-specific sites, some in English and some in other languages. Additionally, long-shot rival Friendster launched a Traditional Chinese version last week, a move geared toward its Asia-centric user base.