Authors: Katherine Losse
“Hmm, I’ll have to think for a moment,” I replied.
“As the Taoist philosopher Lao-Tse said, all decisions can be made in the span of one breath,” Kai wrote back.
I knew immediately what I wanted to do, but I held back for a day or two just to gut-check my feelings. After thinking it through, the answer was as obvious as on first consideration: I loved traveling, I loved languages, and I had already taken the initiative with Sam to extend Facebook networks to foreign countries before site translation was even a twinkle in Mark’s eye. Internationalization—the process of translating the Face-book site interface into different languages so that anyone in any country could use the site as easily as English speakers currently did—was what a recruiter might call a core competency of mine, even if I didn’t know exactly what the translation process would entail.
I told Kai that I was game to transfer to the internationalization team and, when I returned from the holiday break in January 2008, I began the process of moving to the brand-new engineering office that had just opened in a building down the street from 156 University. The “i18n Team,” as it was called (“il8n” was shorthand for “internationalization”), was assembled quietly, behind the scenes, by Kai. He embraced the brewing celebritization of Silicon Valley with gusto. Sometimes he would refer to himself and his wife as the “Brangelina of Silicon Valley.” His passion for Hollywoodizing things extended to work issues: When presented with conflicts between team members, he cheerfully cited his wife’s lesson in screenwriting class that all screenplays have a beginning, a fall, and a resolution. He would declare that the conflict was the fall and that we simply needed to work toward the narrative resolution in which all was resolved.
“Just do whatever you think would help get things started,” Kai told me in one of our first meetings, with the relaxed management
style that he made into a hallmark of his brand. His zen approach reflected the cherished valley idea that we, the employees of a successful startup, were all so brilliant that we already knew what to do and if we didn’t, we knew how to figure it out.
In order to put me, a nonengineer, finally, in the coveted, unscripted position of doing whatever I think needs to be done, it was necessary to create a position for me on the engineering team, the site of all creativity in Silicon Valley. The newly created position didn’t even have a name. “What would you like to be called?” asked my newly hired manager, a distinguished-looking older man with friendly, twinkling eyes, Hassin, who reported to Kai. He was a localization ringer from eBay, who had been in the translation business a long time.
Localization
is the industry term for internationalization and is thought to be more sensitive to non-US countries, since, unlike
internationalization,
it doesn’t imply that the United States is the center. Alas, the term never seemed to stick at Facebook, as our team had already called itself the i18n team. I decided on internationalization product manager, since product manager seemed to be the term that, for the few women in engineering, was both authorizing (working with product was the highest status role Facebook had) and non-threatening (it made no claim to actually engineer anything, so the engineers’ technical sovereignty remained untouched).
I was finally in the driver’s seat, in the engineering office, the place where the boys raced around on ripstiks and ran the entire show: Facebook, social networking, and the new social media industry. The freewheeling, fecund world of engineering was kind of its own self-fulfilling prophecy: When you were an engineer, you could make things be any way you wanted them to be.
“Welcome to engineering!” Mark’s admin instant messaged me as I was getting set up at my new desk, with a smiley face tacked on. It did feel a bit like being handed the keys to the kingdom.
• • •
Getting Facebook translated into languages other than English was an obvious move, and the need to extend the network to the world was something I always believed in. The best and most natural use of the product’s virtual scrapbooking had always seemed to me to be keeping up with good friends who lived in distant places. When you were living near your friends, seeing them seemed like a better option for keeping in touch than posting on a social network but, when you were living far apart, a social network could always help you stay up to date.
Unlike the Platform management role with its schmoozy developer politics, I felt no qualms about working on translation. For one thing, I was finally able to work on the real Facebook product for the purposes of serving all of the users, as opposed to serving only developers. Developing the Facebook product, which, by January 2008, 60 million people were using, was what engineers lived for. When you advanced or created a feature and launched it, one minute there would be nothing, and the next minute there would be something, a new Facebook interface ready to receive new users, their data, and their relationships to each other. I had spent too much time with engineers, seeing their excitement and thrill at launching new features, not to want my own taste of the creation moment. Thrax had joked one night to Sam and me as we prepared to launch international
school networks in the fall of 2006, “Are you excited to spread your seed?” I guess we were. Each new network did feel like a product of our loins, there for our decision to lend it life, that night.
The best moments at Facebook always had this intensely potent feel to them: the power to create a world. I knew that feeling of power because, in launching schools, I felt it too. Once a new network was live, I would log in as “The Creator,” the name of our omnipotent test account, to survey our new territory and poke around at the profiles of people joining it. Sometimes, when we logged in, we would update The Creator’s status in words that we imagined the god of Facebook might post. One night I saw that The Creator’s status had been set to “conquering,” and I mentioned it to Thrax over IM. “Is The Creator’s status still set to ‘conquering’?” Thrax, who had posted the status, asked. “The Creator’s status is always set to conquering,” I answered. “Ha ha,” he typed back.
Becoming a fully fledged member of the engineering team that winter felt, as I long dreamed of doing, like going from being slave to being conqueror. Suddenly, I could arrive at work on my own time, as long as I was working late into the night, because it was assumed that I, like all the engineers, was upholding and advancing a whole new world, even if sometimes we were just sitting around in the office eating snacks and playing games. In engineering, getting to work late was cool, even necessary. It meant, in the ideology of the lone and maverick hacker, that you weren’t beholden to authority, and that you might have been up late coding something brilliant and life-changing and disruptive (even if you were just trolling Facebook or watching porn).
Being in engineering wasn’t an escape from the game so much as the ultimate playground.
The new engineering office we moved to in January 2008 seemed designed to physically reflect that we were hovering atop the world, manipulating it digitally from above. It occupied the top two floors of a 1960s style office building in downtown Palo Alto. The floors had been stripped and customized to the tastes of Facebook engineers. The floors were a hard bamboo, the better for ripstiking on, and the walls were a stark white accented by primary colors of blue and red. (Apparently, Facebook’s original graffiti artist, David Choe, wasn’t available to paint before we moved in.) The desks were arranged around the perimeter of the floor so that a de facto racetrack looped in a long, unbroken oval around the office. There was almost always someone ripstiking on the track, making for a constant sound of wheels on wood and the regular, rhythmic appearance of nearly identical-looking guys in hoodies rolling past my workspace; it was almost like working in the middle of an eighties roller rink, without the big roller skates and even bigger hair.
The kitchens occupied a large section of each floor, but they were intended for snacking, not cooking (the only cooking device was a microwave). The walls of each kitchen were stacked with bins of every conceivable candy bar and cereal. None of the food seemed like food to me; it was all cased in plastic and preserved to eternity by chemicals that I couldn’t spell, so I made tea instead and snacked on treats from the Japanese pastry shop down the street. I eventually asked if we could receive weekly deliveries of fresh fruit and gourmet cheese and of course, now that I was a product manager, my wish was granted. The engineers
didn’t always eat the fruit and it would often go bad, but I was relieved that the fruit—something organic—was there. It was the only organic matter in an office piled high with every kind of digital device anyone could think of to buy. (Some were provided free: A cabinet on each floor contained every possible technology, from adapters to storage disks to high-end headphones, that we might need to use in our work.) As I watched the delivery men cart crates full of pears and grapes into the office, I felt like I was trolling the boys with fruit, as if in delayed response to Thrax for making fun of me for looking for organic produce in Safeway.
Amidst all the troll wars and ripstik races that went on in engineering, there was still real work to do. Our task on the internationalization team was to get the site interface translated into as many languages as possible, as quickly as possible. We began the translation process with an idea for an application (which, like most Silicon Valley ideas, was a transmogrification of existing concepts, one of which was the news discussion site Reddit’s voting apparatus) through which users could translate bits of text (called
strings,
in engineering parlance) on the site into their language. The application fed strings to users and they entered the translation in a text box. Other users could vote the translation up or down. This type of crowdsourced interface is all over the Web now as a way of managing the Internet’s increasingly heavy flow of content, but it was a newer interface then, exciting to engineers in its limitless possibilities for mechanization of things formerly considered subjective.
Voting on highly subjective content, such as the right way to phrase a complicated concept like poking or the wall, can produce
more conflict than agreement. There was often no definitively correct answer but, instead, many different interpretations of a given word. For example, the Spanish translators wanted to know if
wall
meant the side of a building or something more like a bulletin board (the answer was the latter, though then there were an array of different words for a bulletin board for translators to vote on and choose from). Usually, the voting results produced passable translations, but when there was a translation impasse, I noticed that some engineers placed an almost religious faith in the voting process, and seemed to feel threatened by the idea that the algorithmically decided results might not be perfect. “The voting will fix it,” they said, like a mantra, as the translations rolled in and vied for victory on the page.
The engineers were beside themselves with glee when the French version of Facebook was translated literally overnight by local users; however, having spent a year in a French school as a child while my mother was on academic business in France, even I knew that the translations, while they were certainly done marvelously quickly, were not polished and correct enough to launch. I argued to my team that some kind of human review of the final product was needed. I just wanted to know, for sure, that the translations made sense and were at least a proximate version of the quality on the English site. Some people on my seven-person team, composed of engineers, Hassin, and a business development guy from Spain by way of Stanford, grew frustrated with my stubborn defense of human cognition over algorithm, but I didn’t much mind. Being the odd defender of the value of the human was something that I was used to and was, after all, sort of my job. In more ways than one, I was like
the humanist troll to the company’s obsession with technologizing everything.
Hassin, a linguist rather than an engineer by trade, agreed that some human input would be worthwhile and so I worked with professional translators to review the site in our first non-English languages, French and Spanish. Once launched, a user would view the site in French or Spanish by toggling a button on the Facebook homepage that would switch the language of the interface (user-submitted content like comments and status updates would remain in whatever language the user wrote in). I spent days with the professional translators while they read through pages of translations and made corrections as needed. They were working by the hour, clocking out at six o’clock, and thought it strange that I seemed perennially online the entire week, answering chats, reading Facebook, talking with them, answering questions, and responding to emails at all hours. When they left the office at the end of the day, they were done until the next morning. That, in turn, seemed strange to me. I couldn’t remember when the last time was that I wasn’t within spitting distance of my computer and smart phone. As much as I had once made fun of the Facebook boys for staring at their phones more often than they looked up, I had become one of them.
We launched the Spanish version of Facebook in February 2008 and followed with French one month later. Both Facebook interfaces launched to good press and widespread adoption, as the site was programmed to appear immediately in French or Spanish when a user signed up or logged in from a country in which one of those languages was primarily spoken. We moved
on from those languages to getting the site translated into German, Japanese, and Italian. French and Spanish came first because they addressed the largest number of potential users but, after that, we translated in order of the wealthiest countries. Internationalization, like everything else, follows the money.
This was where I got lucky, and where my job began to save me from my dry, tech-saturated Palo Alto existence in a new way. Because we were striving for authenticity as well as technical accuracy in translation, it didn’t make sense to hire American speakers of Japanese and Italian to translate the site. We didn’t want a version of Japanese spoken by someone who hadn’t been in Japan for years and wasn’t current with the local idiom. Instead, two months after I started working on the team, Hassin decided that I would fly to Tokyo first, to work with Japanese translators, then fly directly from there to Rome, to work with the Italians. I was getting paid to go on a trip around the world, first class. “That’s a nice gig,” my dad said after I told him I’d be out of the country for a month. “Yes, it is,” I concurred, relieved and excited. My commitment to blanketing the world with our technology was going to save me from it. It is neat how life works this way: No system is complete; there is always a way out if you work hard enough at it. And sometimes, as it was in this case, the escape hatch can be fun.