Facebook users translate the site again, this time to German

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

March 3, 2008, 2:43 PM

The translation project that was only announced at the beginning of the year for Facebook has already made massive progress with only the help of volunteers.

Early in February of this year, the social networking site announced that a team of 1,500 volunteers had translated the entire site to Spanish in just under four weeks.

Now, through the same Translations application designed for Facebook, the site has announced that 2,000 volunteers completed the entire German translation project in just under two weeks.

A rough estimate by Facebook's VP of product management states that German-speaking nations (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Argentina) have over a million active users accessing the site. Users from these countries will automatically access the newly-translated site, others will have to alter their preferences.

French is the next language to be completed, and if this growth trend is any indicator, the project could be finished in as little as a week's time.

After these principal languages are available, Turkish, Swedish, and Italian will be the three most useful languages into which the site could be translated, as Turkey, Sweden and Italy are some of the top Facebook-accessing countries. Furthermore, competing social network MySpace already offers an Italian mirror site, so by adding that language, Facebook can at least achieve full penetration where MySpace has.