On 20 June 2012 13:15, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
A claim made here about Duolingo and translating Wikipedia:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18367017
"With 100,000 active users, von Ahn says Duolingo could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish in five weeks. With one million users, it would take about 80 hours."
See also Tom Morris's blog post on this:
http://blog.tommorris.org/post/23789718674/duolingo-the-future-of-translatio...
- there's some good notes in there about whether this sort of bitty translation is practicable, and how.
One caveat that may be relevant to von Ahn's mention of Wikipedia:
"...in the case of French, they are from the French version of Vikidia, a Wikipedia fork that’s basically a simple version of French Wikipedia intended for 8–13 year old children. There’s also Vikidia versions in Spanish and Italian. Sadly, Duolingo advertises these as being “Wikipedia” tasks rather than Vikidia tasks. There’s nothing wrong with translating non-Wikipedia articles, and it’s great that there is a more school-focussed version of French and Spanish Wikipedias, but it’s slightly deceptive to tell Duolingo users that they are doing a Wikipedia task when they aren’t."