Facebook says hola to Spanish amigos

A Facebook profile in an undated screenshot courtesy of the company. Facebook has introduced a version of the site for Spanish-language speakers, the first of several languages beyond English the social network site plans to offer, the company said on Thursday.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook.com has introduced a version of the site for Spanish-language speakers, the first of several languages beyond English the social network site plans to offer, the company said on Thursday.

Facebook, an online social network that has enjoyed explosive international growth over the past nine months despite remaining an English-only site, said it will introduce German and French versions within weeks.

Sixty percent of Facebook's roughly 64 million users live outside of the United States. More than 2.8 million active users live in Latin America or Spain, the company said.

The Silicon Valley-based company was founded in 2004 as a social site for students at Harvard University and spread quickly to other colleges and eventually into workplaces. Its popularity stems from how the site conveniently allows users to share details of their lives with selected friends online.

Facebook users can choose to view the site in Spanish by changing their account settings. Starting on Monday, Facebook users who sign on to the Web from Spanish-speaking countries will automatically be directed to Facebook en espanol.

As part of the internationalization project, translated versions of the site will be available to Facebook fans on both computers and mobile phones.

Facebook is playing catch-up on the international front to rival News Corp's MySpace, which has national sites in more than 20 countries. MySpace offers versions of its site in Spanish, French, German and Italian, including a site for U.S. Spanish speakers and another for French Canadians.

The company said the Spanish language Facebook was developed over the space of four weeks with the help of 1,500 Spanish-speaking Facebook users, who added a simple translation program to their member profiles to translate the site's menus and product descriptions from English as they used the site.

Users taking part in the project voted on translations by others. For example, translators settled on "dar un toque" as the Spanish phrase for the word "poke," which has ambiguous meanings in Facebook parlance, both in Spanish and English.

Facebook said in a statement that it plans shortly to allow independent developers to use the volunteer translation system to let users translate their own programs into Spanish.

Britain alone has 8 million active Facebook users. Canada is third most active with 7 million users, according to company statistics. Turkey has surged to become the fourth most active Facebook nation and its biggest non-English market.

Rounding out the top ten Facebook markets are Australia, France, Sweden, Norway, Columbia, and South Africa, it said.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Gary Hill)