How is Facebook in Spanish?

A little while ago Facebook launched a Spanish edition of the social network, and since then I’ve heard pretty much nothing about it. So how is it doing?

A quick Google search yields this piece on the American Observer, which has a collection of Spanish user reactions:

Carlos Sanchez, who accesses the network from Spain, appreciates having the option to switch to Spanish, but he won’t.

“I’m already used to the English one, but I think it’s a good way of attracting more people to the site. Most of my friends didn’t use it because it was in English and that might change now,” he said in a conversation through the site.

Unlike Sanchez, Miguel Mayol bets that Facebook will continue to be a network of multilingual users that don’t need editions in their own language because they already speak English. “I think a minority will only have contacts and belong to groups that speak their language, but I don’t think there will be monolingual non-English speakers in Facebook. It will remain a social network for people with higher-education experience,” he said.

A lot of the reaction to the Spanish edition is mixed. Some people wish that the translations were better—apparently there are some sentences which lose their meanings due to poor literal translations.

Personally I think it’s far more important that Facebook support discussion in other languages (in other words, people from China can use character languages in discussion groups) than it is for Facebook to re-write it’s site copy in other languages.

Facebook is far more about what the users put into the conversation, not what Facebook has already “set up.” My guess is that English is fine for the infrastructure, and communities based on language will spring up on their own so long as their keyboard is supported.

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