New York — Facebook on Tuesday announced in a post on its developer blog that “Facebook Connect,” its universal-login service adopted by more than 15,000 third-party sites–is now available in 64 international languages and locales.
Almost 70 percent of Facebook’s 250 million global monthly active users are outside of the US, and most of them are not speaking English. As the site is witnessing massive growth around the world, which began launching international translations of its site early last year, encouraging users to help translate the social-networking service into their native languages.
Now, the company is hoping to win over its international growth by providing translated versions of its web-wide identity service, Facebook Connect. Thanks to its user-driven translation program, Facebook is now available in 64 different languages.
“Developers who have implemented Facebook Connect, including those who have installed social widgets like the Fan Box, now have the ability to decide in which language they want their Facebook Connect features rendered,” the post by Facebook’s James Lezsczenski read. “When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify. User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written.”
Connect translations will probably get a lot more people using Facebook to sign in and share information on web sites everywhere. Combined with Facebook’s move to allow advertising and virtual currency purchases in more real-money currencies, translating Connect could lead to more revenue for the company.
Samples of translations:
These websites will be able to change the language that Connect features are rendered in with some simple code that Facebook has posted to its developer blog. Developers can also choose to use Facebook’s translations application to make their applications available in multiple languages.
The move follows Google Friend Connect adding support for 47 different languages last week. At the time, Google wrote that some 5 million sites are using its identity tool, but as we noted, that is largely because it is a much easier implementation than Facebook Connect, requiring no technical expertise.
If you are interested in reading more about the internationalization of Facebook Connect, check out the developer blog post.