Facebook has launched a Canadian French site, about a year after it launched a French French site.
The translation was done with the help of Facebook users in Quebec, I guess because Facebook is too cheap to hire a real translator for a week to make sure they get it right. These crowdsourced translations caused problems last time, but I don’t notice any glaring errors so far.
Among the translations:
- “Posts” becomes “publications”
- “More” becomes “d’avantage”
- “Tagged” becomes “identifié”
- “Wall” becomes “babillard”
- “Edit Options” becomes … uhh … “Edit Options” (oops)
Actually, Facebook did hire a pro translator to handle the double-checking of the community translations… and that person was me. In fact, my employer, SDL International, was mandated with the double-checking of all the community translations for Facebook across the world. Yes, it would have made sense to hire a pro translator from the start, but in general, it wasn’t bad at all. The hardest was to make everything as uniform as possible. Now, mind you, I couldn’t possibly cover everything on Facebook, especially since I did not have a lot of time to do that assignment, so there are cetainly some pages that remain half-translated or badly translated. However, the main pages on the site were double-checked.