Translationally...
Facebook wants to know: ‘Do you speak English (UK)?’.
I assume it’s asking me this because I’ve told it I live in Britain. Indeed, several of my friends have commented that they, too, have been asked to ‘Help translate Facebook into English (UK) so that it can be used by people all over the world, in all languages.’
I’m all for linguistic pluralism, and giving everyone the opportunity to use Facebook (or Google, or whatever else) in their own language. In some instances (spell-check comes to mind), it may be helpful to have several different settings for dialects of the same language. At the same time, it seems somewhat unnecessary to have separate versions of Facebook for different varieties of English, given that they’re mutually intelligible. Most U.K. English speakers are pretty adept at navigating American English (and vice versa), but, even if they weren’t, there are precious few phrases on Facebook that wouldn’t already work on both sides of the pond. In fact, the most blatantly American thing I could find was the use of college to mean university. Such a difficulty might be eradicated by aiming for an international standard: in this case, they could opt for university, since to Americans university still means ‘university’ (even if they would typically say college), while to people in many other places college is something different.
I’m also now wondering how thoroughly Facebook is covering different dialects. Are there to be translations into English (Canadian) and English (Australian)? Will they be covering all the different varieties of Spanish and French and Arabic? And what about variation within countries? Will we be seeing English (Scotland) and English (California)?
All in all, I don’t think it’s worth users’ time to help Facebook translate between Englishes.
