Facebook’s mistranslated Menu Item

Yes, I know, translating GUI’s and webpages correctly is a difficult task. There is a lot of multilingual software out in the wild that is translated very poorly… Yes, sometimes even Microsoft Windows in Dutch looks awful ;)

But now have a look at the following example. This is not what you expect of a big multinational company called Facebook.

My native language is Dutch, and so my Facebook language was also set to Dutch.
I had a look at the “Build Audience” menu at my Facebook page, this is called “Publiek opbouwen” in Dutch, so far so good.
But then, when the drop-down menu opens, I get an option “Ongeldige e-mailcontactpersonen”, this is in English “Invalid Email Contacts”.. WTF does that do?!?!

I switched back to English language, then the option says “Invite Email Contacts…”, well that makes more sense to me. Clicking the item opens up a dialog to send invites to your page by importing e-mail contacts from various e-mail services like Yahoo and Windows Live Hotmail.

It’s a least a little bit strange that you have to click on “Invalid Email Contacts” in Dutch to invite people to your page!

Facebook, let me help you… ;)
The menu item should be translated to “E-mailcontactpersonen uitnodigen…” or something alike.

 

4 comments

  1. Jeffrey says:

    But what happend when you clicked on the dutch menu item? Did it work?
    Because I think that they _did_ translated it correctly, only the scripting is bugged.”Ongeldige emailcontactpersonen” sounds more like an error that you get after importing email contacts? :)

    • BrainB0ne says:

      It opens the correct “E-mailcontactpersonen uitnodigen” dialog, just as expected. And the caption/title of that dialog is correctly translated, it says “E-mailcontactpersonen uitnodigen”. So the functionality works, but the translation is incorrect.

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