I noticed that when I logged in to the Facebook client they offered the opportunity to use Facebook in Chinese. I’ve never seen any mention of it until recently, but to be honest I’ve been considerin the implication of Facebook in Chinese for a while. I mean, if you have 200,000,000 users in the world, and then you have the opportunity to add one billion more in China, you take the opportunity.
So now they’re doing some translation service – in effect, they’re asking people who use the application to translate Facebook into Chinese themselves, and then they will use those translations so that people can use it in China. I think it’s a good idea, but sometimes when I use applications in different languages (and when I tried to use Facebook in Chinese) I find that it is a bit daunting.
Anyway, so if Facebook adds a couple of hundred million Chinese people, how will they integrate and communicate with the other people who are currently using the site in English? Chinese characters are completely different from English script (or any other European script) and so it is difficult to comprehend what people are saying, even with the use of Babelfish or Google Translate. Oh well. We’ll see how Chinese Facebook takes off soon.