Facebook, the popular social networking site, will soon be available in German and French versions. The translations will be performed by Facebook members. Over 2000 German natives volunteered to translate the site in two weeks. A Spanish version was completed by members in February.
Translations for free is becoming a popular trend. For another example of this type of “crowdsourcing”, refer to my earlier post on Adobe.
What is your opinion of crowdsourcing? Can you imagine working on a project for a company without getting compensation?

Adobe has started a new process for translating (”localizing”) its software products into foreign languages. According to Francis Tsang, director of globalization at Adobe Systems Inc, “there is far too much content that needs translating”. Crowdsourcing is a term, coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe in Wired Magazine, to describe the involvement of a large number of people working on a task usually performed by a company’s employees or contractors. The concept is similar to the development of open source software where the premise is that a large group of people working on something they love can generate better results …read more