Turkish pranksters load Facebook Translate with swears Facebook's attempts to crowdsource translations have gone awry in Turkey. A group of Turkish pranksters banded together to submit bogus translations so that a Facebook IM error message was rendered in Turkish as "Your message could not be sent because of your tiny penis". The correct version should say the message could not be …
You could make the messages more meaningful.
Change "Sponsored results" to "Everything under here is trash and should be ignored".
Change "Chat" to "Why not talk to someone in real life instead".
Change "Share only with friends" to "Every app and google search on the planet will get this in the next rework of permissions".
Change "Farmville" to, well, maybe one of the swearwords they used.
Anon because Zuckerberg might find me....
Yes, don't bother going on-line with a service as ropey as Facebook (unless you think Microsoft might want to give you $240 million, to help fund the whole worthless enterprise - in which case, party on until the money's all gone).
However, this does mean that, in Turkey at least, Facebook users were briefly known as "dumb likes".
It also happened a while back with the Norwegian translation of their TOS - http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2008/08/facebooks-norwegian-tos
There's a lesson to be learned here - Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Pay nothing, the monkeys may start flinging shit at you. It does rather beggar belief that Farcebook seem not to have had someone in place to at least give their crowdsourcing attempt cursory oversight (again).
From an organization whose operating motto concerning users is "dumb fucks", it's hardly unbelievable.
It is, on the contrary, totally in line with the Wikipedia mentality, which is more than a bit hippy in believing that "the people know best".
Unfortunately, it has been proven time and time again that the only thing "people" know is how to destroy culture.
"People" are only interested in booze, money and your daughter's boobs.
It takes an enlightened mind to create - and such a mind is, by definition, the exception rather than the norm.
Am I becoming a misanthrope ? Check.
Back in, oh I don't know, the 1990s, the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious issued the following memo, marked Urgent.
"Any online service, whether it’s translation or reputation services, which solicits user generated content would be well advised to quality check that content before going live with it."
Apparently only people with functioning brain cells got it.
I wondered why yesterday, when I tried to correct a "Spanish" translation which looked rather more like German, I got an error message telling me that I haven't been using Facebook for long enough. As I've been using the translation app since the day Facebook en español was launched, that was surprising, but it could have been a bodged attempt to suspend translation while they decide what to do.
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