Now you can “anklopfen” on Facebook

While traditional media gloatingly proclaim the death of Facebook, the social networking giant does what it can to get closer to users. Yesterday a German version of the site was launched and it was done through a crowd-sourcing initiative in which 1,000 members helped translate the site in just two weeks.

“Users who added the Facebook translation application were allowed to submit translations inline while browsing the site. Facebook users then approved all translations through a voting system. For example, users agreed on ‘anklopfen’ to describe the Facebook-coined term ‘poke’.” 

According to the press release, the person who was the most frequent translator was responsible for more than 1000 of the winning sentences. Over 40 contributors translated 100 sentences or more.

Oh, and by the way, there is an error in the article at about Facebook stats. The article claims that 400,000 UK members left the site the last two months while in reality the only known fact is that it had 400,000 less unique visitors in the UK in January.