On 16 January 2012 02:22, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

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.

Yes I agree this is a potential risk, but I would say that this kind of thing should only be done with: a) local on-wiki consensus b) to the talkpage (or some kind of project page) - NOT directly over the top of the existingarticle. These points would, I think, alleviate the concerns you raised.

This is all hypothetical of course as, like you say, their website is pretty empty right now given it's still in private beta. I'm sure we'll be able to see some of the "translation results" once their project gets further developed. And hey, since they're spruiking that their system could potentially translate all English WP to Spanish in very short time, perhaps they were thinking of giving us their results already :-)

Does anyone know any more about this organisation or what they plan to do with their translations, once they've been made?

-liam

It is not 280+ languages, but it is more than English to Spanish and most likely more languages can be added. I already tried using it to study German, and i was very positively impressed with their nice exercise system.

My guess is that at a later stage they'll want to employ crowdsourcing techniques to get people to manually translate sentences as exercises to build a large corpus of translations, or maybe somehow use the language courses to correct machine translations. There's nothing wrong about it and we can try to collaborate there and get their users to translate some things that would be useful for us. For example, summaries of important articles from English and French Wikipedias to smaller languages that don't have them yet, or articles about the local cultures to larger languages.

They seem to be rather open and friendly to modern technologies and Free software: When I noticed that they use Flash for audio, i emailed them about it and said that it's unfortunate that they use this outdated technology instead of HTML5. They actually replied and said that they plan to replace it with HTML5 as soon as modern browsers support the audio features they require. So it's probably possible to approach them with more ideas for collaboration.

-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2012/1/16 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:

Hoi, It is nice but it is from English to Spanish and seriously, we support 280+ languages so it is interesting but not that relevant. Thanks,    Gerard

On 16 January 2012 02:19, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com 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?

Whilst this project provides language lessons at no-cost I do NOT expect this system to be "free" in the FOSS sense. Nevertheless, if the translations are valuable, and the project proves to be popular (generating lots of translations), do we think it would be worthwhile to contact the organisation to try and feed their "best" wikipedia translations back into the Wikipedias as suggestions? Perhaps a bot could place it on the talkpage of existing articles by under the heading of "suggested content from en.wp by crowdsourced translations"? Though, I don't know how it would work for articles that don't exist in that language yet...

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

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