[Foundation-l] Duolingo, potential way of getting good quality translations?

[Gerard Meijssen]

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 at 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-translate-the-web.html
> 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
>
> Peace, love & metadata
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