Facebook users in China received a message on their main pages this morning asking them to help out with the translation of the site into simplified Chinese — a very “Web 2.0″ approach to the arduous task of translating the site. It will be interesting to see how many answer the call, and how long it will take: Translating a site as massive as Facebook into any language is daunting. It will involve rendering into Chinese literally tens of thousands of text strings.

If that weren’t enough to prompt another avalanche of rumors about the impending arrival of Facebook, Marketwatch has reported that Hutchison Whampoa chairman Li Ka-hsing has made a further investment into the mammoth, fast-growing social network, bringing his total to over $100 million (his initial investment had been $60 million for a paltry 0.4% of the $15 billion company). His last investment touched off speculation that Facebook would be partnering with Tom.com, the portal in which he owns a substantial stake.

Disclosure: I am a member of Facebook competitor Friendster’s advisory board, and OgilvyOne’s Beijing office has been engaged by Friendster to do some marketing work earlier this year. That doesn’t mean I’ll poop on Facebook — an SNS I happen to quite like, and of which I’m an avid user — or snipe at its efforts to enter China. But it does mean that I’ll pass on Facebook’s request that I help with the site translation.