Does Facebook speak your language?

DBless Innovative Tech — Facebook has been translated into three new languages — and it has its users to thank.

Be it "what's on your mind?" or the "like" or "share" buttons, a dedicated community of Facebook users want to make sure all the words and phrases on the social networking service are accurately translated into their native tongues.

In all, Facebook is now available in 101 languages with the addition on Friday of Maltese (the official language of Malta that has more than 400,000 native speakers), Pulaar (a dialect of Fula spoken by more than 7 million across West and Central Africa), and Corsican (spoken by some 200,000 people and listed on UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.)

Human-powered translation is critical to Facebook's growth. More than 1 billion of the 1.7 billion people who use Facebook speak a language other than English. That number will undoubtedly increase as more people connect to the Internet.

"As the number of languages grow, the number of people on Facebook also grow," Iris Orriss, Facebook's director of internationalization, told USA TODAY.

The goal: to eventually translate Facebook into all the languages requested by Facebook users. More than 40 more languages are currently in the process of being translated.

"A  lot of passionate people feel strongly about having Facebook in their language," Orriss says.

Among them: Vannina Bernard-Leoni who two years ago leaped into action after learning that Facebook was being translated into Breton, spoken in the Brittany region of France.

"Corsican people thought, 'If Facebook can be translated into Breton, why not  in Corsican?'" says Bernard-Leoni, director of innovation and development at Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli.

She gathered six students to begin translating English into Corsican. Soon hundreds joined in and ultimately a couple thousand, all tapping into the broader movement to save the Corsican language.

"The Corsican language is really important for the people here, and unfortunately, it is an endangered language." Bernard-Leoni said. "The translation proves that Corsican language is not only a vestige of the past...it could be a part of the future for our people."

In 2007, Facebook was only available in English, a significant barrier to Facebook's stated mission of connecting every person on the planet. A hackathon at Facebook produced a community translation tool that let Facebook users translate the service into their native tongues. The tool released in 2008 asks native speakers to submit translations of phrases and then solicits their votes on which is the most accurate.

"It's almost like a democratic process to find the best version of Facebook in that language," Orriss says.

Another important effort for Facebook: to bridge language and culture so that people can translate status updates into their own tongue, without any of the colloquial language getting lost in machine translation. Most recently, Facebook has turned to neural  networks in a quest to improve automated translation of status updates.