On 01/15/12 5:19 PM, Liam Wyatt wrote:
Hi all, I just found this today, from New Scientist: "learn a language, translate the web" http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328476.200-learn-a-language-translat... It's an article about a startup (from the same fellow who did ReCaptcha) that provides language lessons by asking the students to translate sentences from websites - Duolingo http://duolingo.com/ The examples used in their own video and also the New Scientist article are all about translating the English Wikipedia into Spanish. Has anyone had any contact with them before?
...
From a legal standpoint I believe translations are derivative works and
therefore, because of the Share-Alike principle, the translations are already legally compatible to be re-imported.
Just a thought, no idea if it can work in practice though. In any case, Duolingo seems to be an interesting project and time will tell whether it actually is a useful method for people to learn a language (or not)!
-Liam
It is an intriguing idea. The notion that one is doing something useful while learning does tend to strengthen learning. The site doesn't do much to answer possible questions. My only option for going further was to sign up for courses, and I wasn't yet ready to do that. One of the risks of using this between Wikipedias is that those in the new language will see it as data dumping. I think some take pride in the fact that their articles on a subject are independently developed.
Ray