Facebook Developers

best not to use the fb:intl tag, it's broken in too many ways. How would you know about abusive translations in a language you don't speak?! Just have your own xml messages files for each language and do the translation on your server side, much safer, more flexible and more reliable.

Last edited by chrisclaydon (2009-03-26 17:48:51)

Hey guys,

Thanks for these reports and feedback. Brad, I went ahead and made a bug for the ban issue here (4808). Can you hop on that and add any info that's helpful?

Cheers,

Matt Trainer

Hi James, great to see a useful response here from someone at Facebook! Could I point out some other major issues with translations:

#1 app titles and descriptions cannot be translated, so users in other countries can't ever find the translated apps.
#2 some of my fb:intl tags had links ('a' tags) embedded in them. This worked fine until Facebook started adding random numbers on the end of all the urls in the a tags, then thousands of different versions of the same intl tag were generated and it became impossible to manage my translations for that app any more!
#3 there seems to be no way to delete disused translations. If I could remove all the disused translations caused by bug #2 I could then start using fb:intl again where appropriate. As it is, on the translations editor for the app I have to wade through hundreds of disused translations before seeing any of the ones in use in order to check/approve/freeze them.
#4 there seems to be no way to automatically copy my portuguese (brazil) translations into portuguese (portugal) rather than starting again from scratch. I had a professional translator do my translations so they would be understood in both countries.

Last edited by chrisclaydon (2009-03-27 21:44:10)

Thanks Yeldarb, useful information.

Are you sure 'delete all phrases' will not delete the translated phrases as well as the untranslated ones?
Even if that does work, hundreds of identical versions of the same tag but with a different number on the URL have ALREADY been translated by users I think, so I also need to delete those duplicate translations without losing all the good translations which don't have a URL in them.

Wow, not sure how that posted double after you had already posted.

Yeah, I had to use the Delete All Phrases button and it worked like a charm.  I'd guess that behind the scenes they are hashing the text between <fb:intl> and </fb:intl> along with the description and mapping them to translations.  When it encounters an <fb:intl> tag it hashes it, sees if that hash is in your phrases and if so grabs the translation associated with it (if not it adds it to the translation app to be translated).

Pretty sure deleting the phrases leaves the map in tact but clears out the "phrases" array.  So once a phrase pops up again it will hash it and see that there is a translation associated with that hash already and the linking will remain in tact.  (At least that is how it appears to be how it worked for me).

If you change the text with the URL in it to use the <fb:intl-token> tags before you clear out the phrases only one phrase will show up for all phrases of that form and the bad ones won't be in there (assuming they aren't popping up in your application since they've been changed so the variable is an <fb:intl-token> rather than text.

Last edited by Yeldarb (2009-03-28 07:39:22)

After what happened today and was reported on by AllFacebook, do you think they are finally going to listen to us and fix the translations system?

AllFacebook.com wrote:

Soon after I posted, a number of people notified me of offensive statements that were showing up in the box and then by the evening one of our readers, Liam McKinnon, sent us as screenshot of some offensive content which I’ve posted above. Essentially what had taken place was that someone had modified the word “friends† to become the phrase “friends are double n****rs†.

There were other phrases that were appearing but by today the bug was fixed. This isn’t the first time that the Facebook translations application has been abused. Back in January, Facebook’s advertising promotion page had the word “Ads† replaced with “Lying†. The problem was quickly fixed but it has become clear that the translations application can be abused.

Worth a read:
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/04/face … -comments/

reface.me wrote:

Similar problem (with the "Suggestions" section) reported 2-3 days ago: friends are fans notification hacked?

I just posted that above.

James Leszczenski wrote:

To clarify both on this thread and on the bug, you're the one who gets to
choose which languages are translatable.  Until you decide to publish a
particular language using the Translations application, none of your regular
users will see translations for a language (except those who are translating
it, of course).

Untrue, none of the langages are published in my app, yet translated phrases are visible by anyone. Sadly, it includes phrases breaking the Translations feature+Ajax, due to a question mark.

Vote on bug 5827 please.