As the Facebook platform expands the number of users who are not native English speakers is growing. Facebook just released a Spanish version of the site and used a neat idea to translate everything into Spanish. Instead of sending all the text off to professional translators, they set up a system where Facebook users who speak Spanish could translate text directly on the site.

This creative use of the user base seems to have worked well as it resulted in the entire site being translated in less than a month.

Facebook has announced that the method they used to translate the site will soon be made available to application developers.

I'm interested to see how they intend on implementing this, but this could be a great way to easily (and cheaply) get your applications working in many different languages. Translating is not a trivial task and often difficult with software since context is crucial. A professional translator might not understand the context of your text, but someone who is already a frequest user of your application might have a much greater chance of correctly translating it into their native languages.