14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is currently the largest social network in the world and has held this title for more than a year now. For a long period of time its international growth and presence far outweighed that in the US, its home market and, despite becoming the largest social network in the US earlier this year as well, most of the site's audience is still outside the country. Part of the reason why Facebook managed to see this type of growth internationally is because it crowdsourced its translations efforts, something that the social network apparently wants to patent, as TechCrunch found.
As late as 2008, Facebook was still only offered in English so the social network released an app, aptly named Translations, which enabled users to translate various parts of the site, a significant cost advantage for the company. The move proved very successful and a Spanish translation was available within a few weeks of the launch. Since then the effort has expanded to a large number of languages, with Facebook supporting over 60 locales.
The program proved so popular that the company applied for a patent for the procedure. The patent claim was filed in December 2008 but has only just recently become available online. However, depending on how broad Facebook wants the patent to be, it may encounter some problems as several other social networks have deployed similar systems to help with their translation efforts and, while most of them have done so after Facebook, Meebo used crowdsourcing for its translations as early as 2006.
“Embodiments of the invention provide techniques for translating text in a social network. In one embodiment translations of text phrases are received from members of the social network. These text phrases include content displayed in a social networking system, such as content from social networking objects,” the filing abstract reads.