Ultan Ó Broin mentioned my name in his Blogos entry "The Future of Web Translation: Haters Gonna Hate" and I felt compelled to watch the video by Luis von Ahn, the inventor of Recaptcha, at a recent TEDx event at Carnegie Mellon University.
Duolingo does for translation what Flickr did for photography and what Wikipedia did for encyclopedias. It brings the knowledge of amateurs to do some work that only professionals could do. The advantage of Duolingo is that − unlike Facebook or Hootsuite, who also use community translation − the user learns a language in the process.
Crowdsourcing − the approach used by Duolingo − is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call. The goal for Duolingo is to get 100 million people to translate the web into every major language for free.
The trade-off here, according to Luis, is that there are 1.2 billion people in the world learning a second language and they have to pay for it. With Duolingo, they will learn a language for free and translate the web in return. A really revolutionary and innovative concept.
According to Luis, using this approach, Wikipedia could be translated into Spanish in five weeks with 100,000 people or in 80 hours with one million individuals.
Who does this approach benefit? Everybody.
Who does it hurt?
- Insecure translators who like to complain about things they can't control.
- Rosetta Stone, Livemocha, Fluenz and other software-based language learning software.
- Machine translation providers like AsiaOnline, PROMT and SDL, because Duolingo could be a faster/better solution.
