Facebook is announcing a new tool, Translations for Facebook Connect, that will tap into the wisdom of the crowd to help webmasters and site owners translate their websites and applications for an international audience.
The technology is based on the same solution Facebook developed for itself when it decided to make the site available in multiple language. The Translations application launched in January 2008 to great success, as volunteers around the globe chipped in to translate Facebook into more than 65 languages.
Facebook Official Blog Says:
How It Works
You can start integrating Translations for Facebook Connect into your site with an HTML file and a few lines of JavaScript in less than an hour. Whether you want to translate an application, a social widget, or an entire website, you have complete control over every aspect of the translation process. After you choose what languages you want your site or application to support, you can get help from the Facebook community to translate your site, as we did, or you can do the translation yourself, or make a specific person the administrator of the process. To start translating your site, read the documentation on the Developer Wiki.
With a revamped set of server-side API methods, you can submit content to the Translations application as needed by calling the intl.uploadNativeStrings API method, as well as retrieve submitted and translated content through the intl.getTranslations API method and translation FQL table. Once you register content for translation, your connected Facebook users can start translating your sites’ content just as users helped translate Facebook.
There’s also a new client-side feature set, built upon our XFBML framework. We’ve created an XFBML version of the fb:intl tag and other related tags, which let you get started more quickly and easily. Developers who use these features will not only automatically have their wrapped content submitted to the Facebook Translations application, but translators will also have the option of translating the content inline.
To try out the new XFBML features, we’ve created a very basic demo to get started. With this, you can quickly get started and see the translation mechanism in action.