On June 5 of this year we hosted colloquium on collaborative translation in Palo Alto where several of the Facebook language managers spoke about their approach to community translation. When casual observers comment about how getting the users to translate sounds like good business, they are alluding to the bit about it being wink-wink-nudge-nudge “free.” Actually, it costs money to manage work, whether your workers are volunteer or paid. Not to mention, in Facebook’s case, investment in building a collaborative translation capability into the product itself. Free was not the point. Time was. Translations started appearing in days, rather than in the months it otherwise would have taken a vendor to manage, test, and deliver a localized user interface of more than 100,000 words.

And speed has paid off, handsomely. comScore this week released a new study of social networking sites (remember, it was not so long ago that such studies would only look at U.S. traffic, with no mention of the fact that people even exist outside of North America?), showing rapid growth everywhere except the U.S., where it has already tapered off. In the past year, the social audience grew only nine percent in North America compared to 35 percent in Europe. The Middle East-Africa region was up 66 percent and Latin America 33 percent. Asia is still on the upswing at 23 percent. So, social networking has been a great space to be in this last year.

But Facebook is winning the sweeps. Comparing June’s monthly traffic volume against the benchmark of June 2007, Facebook’s traffic grew 458 percent in Asia-Pacific and a whopping 1055 percent in Latin America, where it went from about one million to almost 12 million unique visitors per month.

In August 2007, when we examined 505 top websites in 15 different countries, Facebook was a flop, from the globalization perspective. It was available in English only, giving it a paltry AQ rank of 277 and an e-GDP score of 48 percent. But then in February the company announced Spanish, and today the site is offered in a staggering 20 different languages, making it the fastest globalizer known to this author. In a mere five months period, the company has turned the dial up and now pulls a 908 AQ and 84.5 percent e-GDP. That last score is a measure of the economic potential of online language populations, with Facebook addressing nearly 85 percent of the “world online wallet.”

A final note on quality. Another myth about community translation is that quality by definition must be lacking. On this point, the Facebook team opined that there were no industry expert translators available — except, of course, among the users of Facebook. Who else would know better the unique jargon and style of Facebook? Community voting ensures that the best solutions are chosen for each string. Oh yes, and longer texts, such as the legalese portions that are not so fun to translate, those still get sent out to the pros. You’d have to actually pay someone to translate that.