Facebook: I’m ROTFLOL!!!
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009Let me contextualize this mirth from several angles.
I joined FB over 3 years ago and at the w/e read an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook, by Ben Mezrich (to be published by William Heinemann on July 30) on the Times website:
Here’s the cover of the book itself with a hint of why FB was born (btw, there’s a Kindle DX version of it too so if readers click on the image they’ll be directed to Amazon):
The book essentially suggests that FB was built so that frat boys at Harvard could meet pretty girls from the various sororities. It could become like their “little black book” online with ratings of the girls’ pictures — the LBB they don’t want their wives to find out about later (A-HA! NOW are we understanding the needs for privacy settings yet? Beyond identity theft and poke harassment concerns?)
Also, can we twain the ultimate truth?
Billionaires are created because men always want to impress us women — and why not? After all, the female gender does have the X factor in our chromosomes, right? RIGHT. And, in return, men produce in us women not billions but the question, “Y?!”
Fine, I’m being tic-lol again [tic-lol = tongue in cheek, laugh out loud] but it’s still true.
Yes, I did register on FB but not because of any Harvard connection or desire to be part of any giant match-making site. And, no, not under my real name. My friend sent me a poke, I joined for the sake of strategic analysis, we swapped e-gifts of some chocolates and champagne, we posted some travel photos (hers from LA and mine from Florence and Beijing) onto each other’s Walls and I thought, “Ok, that’s enough of that!” The time I gave FB the first time round was all of 5 minutes and I abandoned it — despite frequent pleas from my friend to return and engage because it was the only place she was posting her travel photos.
This early departure was before they overhauled their privacy settings, real-time updates, frequency of notifications and filtered through their apps to keep the better ones and bin the marketing spam ones.
Anyway, so now I have 2 FB accounts and finally today I went to take a 60 second look-see-delve at the site and what do I come across in those 60 secs?
Incongruities which make me ROTFLOL is what!
(1.) I could change my name to Attila the Hun and the system would accept it instantaneously.
Ok, so I didn’t do that. I only changed it to Twain Niawt — which, obviously, is the mirror image of Twain — to see how quickly changes take effect. There’s some notification that it will take 24 hours and a message saying that the name change has been notified which implies they’re going to verify it independently somehow. More importantly, there was a warning that the name change had to be legitimate so “no pet names, assumed celeb names etc.” are allowed.
No problem so I went with the chiral of my first name instead and thought, “Let’s see what it says in 24 hours.”
Only….in reality it happened immediately. Here it is:
(2.) Facebook wants me to become an English (UK) translator and obviously needs people like me
Now, it should be noted that English was the 3rd language I learnt as a child. Yes, I am aware I play fast+loose with the language on my blog but anyone who’s ever read an official strategy paper or an equity analysis research note from me knows my professional standard of English is of the top level. A person doesn’t get double A in their national English exams, elected to the Academic Board at university, published in the leading derivatives journal aged 22 and later promoted into CEO-Chairman’s Office of a Tier 1 bank, where they contribute to bank-wide policy papers whilst in their 20s, unless they have a fairly good command of English.
There’s simply no need for grammatical pedantry on my own blog. Its style is conversational, educational and occasionally tic-lol with mash-ups of concepts and characterizations.
In any case, FB clearly needs English (UK) translators. Please read the notice carefully.
“…ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN ALL LANGUAGES.”
Errrrrrr………if people are translating it into English (UK) that’s not all languages. They’ll only be able to read it in the UK version of English which uses terms like these, including street slang and colloquialisms, that are distinctive from their American cousins:
* parents — folks
* trousers — pants
* sidewalk — pavement
* soccer — football
* sneakers — trainers
* store — shop
* candy — sweets
* highway — motorway
* apartments — flats
* dope — blinding
* cool — wicked
* drunk — skank
Actually. it may be a wee bit worrying that an American-founded site feels the need to translate itself for the English (UK) audience — has the #You say “potato,” I say “patattah”# affectionate differences of Cole Porter’s days become such a chasm in the Internet era? Or is the implication that most of the world understands English (UK) better and with more clarity than English (US)? Ergo, they included the “used by people all over the world” snippet.
See what I mean about this translation notice? It’s become unclear and ambiguous because of grammatical inaccuracy.
If this is how FB is inviting English (UK) native speakers to participate in the translation, I wonder what’s lost in translation in the notices to Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, etc. native speakers to contribute to the project……..
They’re smart folk at FB; they’ll figure it all out.
