Chinese efforts to provide signage in English as the 2008 Olympic Games approach inspired Wired Magazine writer Michael Erard to speculate about the future of English as a global language.

The expected “Chinglish” translation boners are cited, but the author also looks at some of the ways English is being changed in different ways in different parts of the globe, similarly to the way Latin and Arabic splintered into a number of locally-influenced dialects.

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

English is “mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it’s on a path toward a global tongue—what’s coming to be known as Panglish.”

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.

A new cartoon by Tony Beckwith illustrates an article by Fabiano Cid, "The Best Breed of Project Managers: How to make the most of your feline or canine features when managing a project," in GALAxy, the newsletter of the Globalization and Localization Association.

Some may think of cats as smart and superior beings, while others consider them self-centered and unreliable. The same occurs with dogs: they may look stupid and subservient to cat lovers, but cynophiles consider them loyal, sociable and dependable. Project managers can also have either characteristic when performing their daily work. The trick is to balance your feline and canine qualities to make sure the most important goal is achieved: client satisfaction and retention.