Investigating language policy in social media: translation practices on Facebook

This chapter is concerned with the Facebook Translations application (app) through which the social network site has internationalised its website. Despite its international reach, with over 70% of Facebook users being from outside the United States of America, the site was only available in English until February 2008. Following the development of the Translations app, the site was first opened to Spanish, and was quickly followed by French, German and another 21 languages in 2008 (Facebook, 2012). Since then the Translations app has continued to be ‘released’ to more languages and, at the time of writing (November 2012), is available in 110 languages including minority or regional languages, such as Irish and Welsh; the national varieties of US English and UK English1; and other languages and varieties such as Leet Speak, Esperanto and Pirate English.