The social networking site Facebook is using the wisdom of crowds to localize the site into nearly two dozen languages, but the user-translators do it for nothing more than bragging rights, according to a recent article in the Austin American-Statesman.

The four-year-old company, now estimated as worth $15 billion, has 69 million users, 60 percent of whom live outside the United States, hence the effort to serve those who don’t speak English. But Facebook’s approach has been controversial.

The concept of collaborative translation is familiar in open-source programming communities. But Facebook’s effort — as it builds sites in Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch to join versions in Spanish, French and German that launched this year — is among the highest-profile attempts to harness users’ energy to do work traditionally handled by professionals.

The Spanish-language version has taken a particular beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems throughout.

Ana Torres, a 25-year-old professional translator in Madrid, Spain, called the translation "extremely poor," citing "outrageous spelling mistakes" such as "ase" instead of "hace" (for "makes" or "does") and usage of the word "lenguaje" for "language" rather than the more appropriate "idioma."

Other critics say Facebook just wants free labor.

Valentin Macias, 29, a Californian who teaches English in Seoul, South Korea, has volunteered in the past to translate for the nonprofit Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia but said he won’t do it for Facebook.

Wikipedia is "an altruistic, charitable, information-sharing, donation-supported cause," Macias told The Associated Press in a message. "Facebook is not. Therefore, people should not be tricked into donating their time and energy to a multimillion-dollar company so that the company can make millions more — at least not without some type of compensation."

Other prominent social networking websites Friendster and MySpace also have international versions, but use professional translators for their localization efforts.

Read the complete article by Associated Press writer Tomoko A. Hosaka, and then express your own viewpoint by leaving a comment on this post.