From the people that brought you captcha and recaptcha, Duolingo.com is the brainchild of Luis von Ahn. The basic idea is this: you learn a language (for free, a full $500 less than Rosetta Stone) by a type of immersion, while simultaneously translating the internet.
Isn't the internet already translated? I mean, you can make a website in any language you want! And if it's not, Google Translate will do it for you! Well the thing is, most successful websites are available primarily in English, thus are accessible mainly to English speakers. To use the example of Wikipedia. The English version of the site has almost 4 million articles. The Spanish version? Under a million. As far as translating programs go, often times, as I'm sure many of you have noticed, are unreliable methods of accurately translating information.
Luis von Ahn's dream is to, in teaching people new languages, translate the rest of the internet into every major language on the planet. Users are given sentences of increasing complexity in the language they wish to learn to translate, and answers can be compared to answers from other users and rated. After extended use the user begins to learn how the language works, and is busy at work translating snippets of web pages.
The internet's potential for massive collaboration could potentially be revolutionary in the greater world's understanding of language. Since new websites and blogs are being CONSTANTLY updated, with a plethora of untranslated text being formed every minutes, learners will have no shortage of things to translate, thus material to practice with. As a result, it is possible that the world will become more worldly. Demographic chunks that otherwise would never have seriously bothered understanding another language (particularly in America) now have access to that in a both intrinsically and extrinsically productive manner. With more and more people becoming accustomed to the annuls of different languages, the world becomes a more interconnected and inter-linguistic communication becomes more seamless.
Every language functions a different way, with certain things that simply cannot be translated while maintaining its original beauty. It is in attempting to translate these phrases, or words, the ones who reference a literary canon apart from our own, that we become exposed to the self-contained beauty of other languages. And even if sometimes we cannot understand it, it would be great step forward to at least appreciate it.
Here is Luis von Ahn's TED talk on the subject.
Duolingo is currently in beta testing, and should hopefully start-up soon.
What would happen if multiple people translate a single webpage into one language differently? Would both sites exist separately? How would it be presented that these are two different opinions/biases on one informational page?
ReplyDeleteWell, what happens is that the final translation is aggregated by multiple translations, provided they are similar enough, and they are translated sentence by sentence. Never is a translation the work of one person, it's large scale cooperation, and each person plays a small role.
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