Duolingo - how to get people to translate for free

[Modest Mouse]

Listen to this TED talk about how you are already helping to digitize old books. Also, how you can learn a new language for free, while simultaneously translating the web.

TED Talk:http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html

The website for free language learning talked about in the TED Talk:http://www.duolingo.com

[ironlady]

Yes, this one is particularly entertaining.

You can learn a new language -- that you don't know -- by providing translations for other people to use?
If only it were that easy.

I think I'll start up a Web site where you can navigate by just guessing where things are. No map cost. Sweet!

I know everyone just adores TED and many people take everything that shows up on TED as gospel and "good ideas", but I've seen this before and it really doesn't make much sense, unless you want a "chabuduo" Internet world out there.

[Modest Mouse]

Yes, this one is particularly entertaining.

You can learn a new language -- that you don't know -- by providing translations for other people to use?
If only it were that easy.

I think I'll start up a Web site where you can navigate by just guessing where things are. No map cost. Sweet!

I know everyone just adores TED and many people take everything that shows up on TED as gospel and "good ideas", but I've seen this before and it really doesn't make much sense, unless you want a "chabuduo" Internet world out there.

Have you tried it out yet? Were you paying attention to the part where he explains how they cross-reference several users' translations?
Sure, starting at this site from scratch might be challenging, but if you have a good foreign language foundation, I think it would work a lot better.

I know they don't have Chinese yet, but a friend of mine said he had a good experience studying Spanish with this website.

[ironlady]

Spanish is 40% cognates with English, to start out.

But yes, I have visited the site.
I've also had experience with a similar system set up for the use of language professionals (!) where they would post terminology questions and have people answer them. The result was chaos, and more wrong answers than correct ones. And that site was catering to professional translators (though the problem that occurred was the same -- there was no quality control by anyone who actually knew the two languages in question, and a system of "votes" meant that people who didn't know where determining what was "right".) Not much different than waiting for the same wrong answer to show up several times and then deciding it's "correct". We actually would expect learners of a language who are learning without comprehensible input (no way to know what things really mean for sure) to make the same kinds of mistakes, since they will have to rely on their knowledge of their native tongue to fill in the gaps (which will be many in this sort of setup).

But it's cheap and it's sexy. Flavor of the month. I'm sure it will be very "successful". Just like immersion programs for language.

[heimuoshu]

Spanish is 40% cognates with English, to start out.

But yes, I have visited the site.
I've also had experience with a similar system set up for the use of language professionals (!) where they would post terminology questions and have people answer them. The result was chaos, and more wrong answers than correct ones. And that site was catering to professional translators (though the problem that occurred was the same -- there was no quality control by anyone who actually knew the two languages in question, and a system of "votes" meant that people who didn't know where determining what was "right".) Not much different than waiting for the same wrong answer to show up several times and then deciding it's "correct". We actually would expect learners of a language who are learning without comprehensible input (no way to know what things really mean for sure) to make the same kinds of mistakes, since they will have to rely on their knowledge of their native tongue to fill in the gaps (which will be many in this sort of setup).

But it's cheap and it's sexy. Flavor of the month. I'm sure it will be very "successful". Just like immersion programs for language.

Sounds like yahoo answers. Thank God I have a smart wife who trusts me otherwise our kids would have not had any vaccinations based on yahoo answers and by God "smart" people vote for the shit they see.

[ehophi]

Duolingo would probably benefit if it used a more incremental approach. Translating whole encyclopedia passages at its outset is daunting and demotivating work.

The principle is interesting, but the error-checking doesn't appear to work without something of the following in place: One could borrow a parallel corpus of professionally translated sentences (for Chinese, maybe this one: http://corpus.nie.edu.sg/babel/index.htm). Following that, one orders the sentences by "difficulty," which from a more mathematical perspective reduces to the following variables: term/morpheme frequencies, binary/ternary/n-ary collocation frequencies, and sentence length. With colloquial outliers, most basic sentences can translate readily to another language without much grammatical concern at all. One could then incrementally increase the number of terms and the lengths of the sentences until, at last, one has learned a few thousand terms and can state sentences of invariable length.

The other line would require a parser which simplifies sentences into all of their constituent forms, but that would require a level of intervention that users probably couldn't engage, and it would be costly unless someone could devise a strategy through which one could challenge native speakers to eek out the atomic sentences from their complex ones.

My guess, as was hinted earlier, is that the TED talk cherry-picked the example. However, if you manage to borrow enough sentences from parallel corpora, determine a way to organize them by difficulty, and then feed that loop back into the data pool which estimates the accuracy of the translation, the rest is borne of itself.

[Petrichor]

I just came across this website: Duolingo It seems to be an underhand way of getting translations done for free. What do others think?

[tsukinodeynatsu]

I just came across this website: Duolingo It seems to be an underhand way of getting translations done for free. What do others think?

I think anyone who uses it might be worse off than using a machine translation, since at least the vocabulary in a machine translation would be mostly correct.

It might be good for the learners to start off with, but there are much better ways of learning a language for free.

[ehophi]

I got my invitation fifteen minutes ago. It's got bugs, or "Él es un niño" doesn't translate into "He is a boy."

But, for what it is, it's got an interesting interface, and I guess it's interactive. I'm betting that someone will get the bright idea and code it for mobile phone interfaces, since everything that the program does can be done on a cell phone.

Oh, and it could do itself a better service by teaching its users how to use a Spanish keyboard over clicking buttons for foreign characters. I don't know how much time it would have taken me if I hadn't been on my Spanish IME and had been clicking on characters squares, instead.