Facebook now available in Quebec French

En février 2008, Facebook a été traduit en espagnol et en allemand. La version française de France a été mise en ligne le lundi 10 mars 2008. La version en français québécois a été lancée le 6 avril 2009. Après ces quelques langues, d'autres ont été introduites sur le site ou sont en cours d'introduction, principalement des langues très répandues, mais également des langues régionales (le basque, le catalan).

From here, four days ago. Rough translation of part of it:

Thanks to the work of hundreds of Quebecois Facebook users, a version in Quebec French of the popular networking site is now available. Though there has been a version in French since last year, many of those from Quebec wanted a version of that spoken in Quebec, said Elmer Sotto from Facebook on Monday...(skipping ahead)...this got Facebook to introduce an application permitting its users to submit suggestions to part on the translation of the site, where the participants can then vote for the phrases they prefer...according to Elmer Sotto, more than 1200 users have contributed to the introduction of the version in Quebec French.

It then mentions that the person who contributed the most to this was a 17-year-old named Jimmy Lavoie, who contributed 56,000 words and 8,000 phrases.

Finally, it mentions two examples: "cégep" and "école secondaire" instead of "collège" and "lycée".

That naturally brings up the question of how far along the Esperanto translation is going, since if we're now getting to the point where Quebec French is available, certainly they are working on one in Esperantujo too.

Let's check...Wikipedia says they were more than 75% done as of last year, but the actual place where the translation is being done gives the following:

12,903 translations submitted
16,721 untranslated phrases
190 total translators


While we're at it, let's compare to some other languages I write about a lot here.

Afrikaans (complete):

41,225 translations submitted
1,189 untranslated phrases
2,539 total translators

Norwegian (bokmål, complete):

52,346 translations submitted
1,237 untranslated phrases
6,211 total translators

Turkish (complete):

76,370 translations submitted
104 untranslated phrases
27,744 total translators

Estonian:

14,204 translations submitted
16,251 untranslated phrases
624 total translators

And finally, Latin:

10,557 translations submitted
19,436 untranslated phrases
401 total translators


It's interesting to compare Latin with Esperanto - Latin has a larger base of people that seem to be interested in contributing but may not know how, whereas Esperanto has less translators and more translations per capita.