Ask HN: Alternatives to Facebook Translation for crowd-sourcing localization?

5 points

17 years ago

To recap, a month ago, Facebook launched a new feature to let developers tap into their crowd-sourcing translation method: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/29/facebook-spreads-its-crowdsourced-translations-across-the-web-and-the-world/

It provides an API to upload strings, and then provides a UI for people with Facebook accounts to submit translations of your strings and vote up or down submitted translations, reddit style. You can appoint people as admins to choose the most promising translations, or you can just trust the community's votes.

This sounds great in theory, but there are a few problems. I don't want to go into too much detail, but to summarize:

- Facebook is extremely unresponsive to bugs and questions (admittedly, it's in beta).

- Facebook requires would-be translators to have had a Facebook account for a secret amount of time before they can translate. Many international people do not have an account.

- The Facebook UI is unsuitable for bulk translation.

So, are there any alternatives for crowd-sourcing translations, or is this one of those problems where every startup rolls their own solution?

1 comment