Hacker News Reader

I have my Facebook set on Spanish to keep my Spanish language neurons firing even when I'm surrounded by Gringos, and their localization definitely has frequent bugs. There's been some issues for months with the birthday wall post aggregation they've been testing in production. I've frequently seen stuff like "So-and-so has written on so-and-so's muro for their birthday."

So yeah, lack of QA => lots of bugs.

View on HN

Facebook's language translations are actually crowdsourced. It's funny that so many people would approve errors like this. There is a brief blog post about it: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10056937130

The whole system is pretty interesting. They maintain a mapping of every token on the site to every language and only user translators verify portions.

Almost all of Facebook's internationalization is crowd-sourced. What you're seeing probably isn't a bug, the string just hasn't been translated by a user yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com