Poncheg.com - State & Community News Blog

Social network Hi5 has launched a site translation project, a week after the announcement that the company had created a “crowdsourced translation” app for use on the OpenSocial developer platform and several months after it initially announced plans for translation.

The site is now available not only in American English, but now also in Catalan, Danish, British English, Finnish, Hindi, Macedonian, Slovakian, Mexican Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Swedish. These translations were generated by community participation and verified by translation service Lionbridge. Later in October, Hi5 plans to launch translated versions of the site in Albanian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, French, Maltese, Norwegian, Serbian, and several other Spanish dialects.

“The power of this program to deliver localized versions of our product has exceeded our own high expectations,” founder and CEO Ramu Yalamanchi said in a release. “It is amazing to see the energy and enthusiasm of our global user community in action, taking our site into new languages and geographies that we otherwise wouldn’t have the resources to address.”

Hi5 is headquartered in San Francisco, but a plurality of its 56 million users come from Latin American countries.