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I've been a Facebook engineer for about 3 years. I've always been really interested
in having the site available to everyone in the world. I have a lot of friends and family
in South America and it was really important to me to be able to connect with them. But
if you didn't speak English, it was hard for you to sign up and use the site.
I mean, the challenge was really huge. So first, the interface of Facebook is relatively
big.
And some of the words like poke or News feed, are our own idiom.
Facebook has over 300,000 words and all the text is dynamic. And we wanted to have every
language.
We realized it wasn't a straight-up translation that we could just hand over to someone to
translate.
Basically, what we decided to do was to build an application that would give users the ability
to translate the site. So as you browse Facebook pages, you're actually able to submit translations
by clicking on words in the interface and that's completely new. That hasn't been done
before. What's unique in our approach is that we came up with a really clever voting mechanism
and reputation system, and that way, we get the best translation coming forward. When
the translation app first launched, we were a little overwhelmed by its popularity so
we had to make optimizations and improvements really quickly. But that's how we do things.
We test and iterate here. It was incredible because you could see how many people, in
a matter of seconds, would install the app and start translating something. In a matter
of hours, hundreds and thousands of translations were submitted. French was incredible. In
less than 24 hours, more than 90 percent of the site got translated in French. I think
Facebook is a great equalizer now that it's available in so many different languages no
matter who you are, where you are in the world, you can use Facebook to share your message.
One afternoon sitting at his computer, totally normal person in Colombia, he came up with
this idea of creating a group. Oscar, the guy who started it, came here to Facebook
to tell his story and it was a really moving story.
[talking]
We've been working on this international product, and it was my first realization. We are doing
something huge.
The fact that an individual can start a group for whatever they're passionate about and
can get millions of people to support them and to be heard, that is something that is
almost unprecedented in any technology medium.
Everything here has such a huge impact for so many millions of people.
We're part of something that's so much bigger than us that you can't really comprehend it.
It's almost humbling to work here, you're gonna be challenged all the time. But good
ideas are gonna be implemented. And it's just a really fun environment to work in.
It's kind of a lifestyle because people care so much.
My passion, since I was a kid, I've always wanted to flu. I've literally flown all over
the world. Sometimes you look at a town and you wonder how many people there are connected
to Facebook.