Kliek oppie doos

2009-04-03 09:28

Alistair Fairweather

Jislaaik, those okes who run Facebook are a bunch of cheapskates hey. Their webpage dingus is worth, like, R15tr but instead of paying some patient oomie to translate all their goedertjies, they ask us to do it instead.

And you know what? The blerrie silly plan actually worked! Over two and a half thousand of die volk have submitted more than 40 000 translations. That's an average of sixteen translations per person - three times the average of the notoriously language obsessed French. Clearly our famous Calvinist work ethic must be slipping if we can compete with people who only work 35 hours a week.

I know what you're thinking - the whole site must be filled with grade eight humour along the lines of "Kliek op die groot doos". But, thanks to clever design by Facebook, this is not the case. Their cunning "Translations" application (of "toepassing") lets you report mangled language wherever you find it, and vote on newly translated phrases. This means that translations are reached by community consensus, rather than imposed from above.

This whole thing reeks of a principle I wrote about last year, catchily named "crowdsourcing". The idea is that thousands (or even millions) of people can collaborate on a single project via the web, and that the result can be as good as something created by a small number of highly paid experts. Wikipedia is the most famous example of this at work.

Passionate people

For the idea to work, though, you do need a core of truly passionate people. Sure some of the translations are a lot of fun (my favourite is "knyp" for "poke"), but you have to really care to labour through beauties like "You must confirm your phone. Facebook Mobile confirmation code".

Luckily for Facebook they picked a language whose speakers are particularly passionate about their taal. Or was it luck? There was some hand wringing and tut tutting in the local blogosphere when the feature launched in the middle of last month. "Why didn't they start with Zulu?" rose the cry.

Fair enough - 24% of South Africans do speak Zulu as a first language (according to the 2001 census). But I'm pretty sure Facebook had a hard look at their South African users before choosing. We may not want to admit it, but the local web (and by extension Facebook) is still a pale affair. And those okies in California are nothing if not pragmatic.

Of course their official line is that there is "no limit" to the number of languages on Facebook, and that the application will let them launch new languages "quickly". Nice side step bokkie.

The real lesson here, then, is if we want a Zulu (or Xhosa, Sotho, Tshwana, etc.) Facebook, we need to do it ourselves. After all Afrikaners don't hold the monopoly on passionate love for a language. And I can promise you, Facebook aren't going to argue. They're just going to smile quietly and count their big pile of money.

Send your comments to Alistair.

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