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

[Ray Saintonge]

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-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?
>
> ...
>
> > 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