[Crowd Leader: Ville Miettinen] How Language Learners are Translating the Web

We’ve all been there. You finish volume 13 of your favorite manga about a young girl coming of age with the assistance of her talking cat, who falls in love with a boy that’s also a dragon, all while saving the world from a dragon that’s also a talking cat. You go online to order volume 14 but for some reason, Amazon doesn’t stock it. You trawl the Internet looking for another vendor. Several sleepless nights later you find it on a Japanese website. You are overjoyed until you realize the whole site is in Japanese and you can’t figure out how to order the book. With no way to quickly and cheaply have the website translated, you reconcile yourself to learning Japanese after all.

Even if this has never happened to you, you've probably stumbled across a site or two that you couldn't navigate because of a language barrier. Most of us have also considered learning another language at some point, but couldn't find the time for night classes (or perhaps the money for online tuition).

Now there is an ingenious crowdsourced solution to both of these problems called "Duolingo."

Crowdsourcing pioneer Luis Von Ahn owns the big brains behind Duolingo (if his name doesn't ring a bell, he was the one behind everyone’s favorite bot blocking book digitizer, reCaptcha).

Cost in translation
If you want to learn a language (only Spanish and German for now), Duolingo will provide you with free language learning software. As you learn, the software gets you to translate text from the web appropriate to your ability. When you submit the text Duolingo matches it against other submissions to check its accuracy and then give you feedback on your progress.

If you want text translated, you send it to Duolingo, who farm it out to their translators, check the results, then send it back to you. Essentially it's a system that trades translation microtasks for language learning, and in doing so ingeniously squeezes some productivity out of the language learning process.

Of course, we all know that the initial enthusiasm to learn a language can quickly wane (don’t pretend I’m the only one with a copy of “Japanese for beginners” gathering dust on their bookshelf). Von Ahn has thought of this (of course). To keep the translators hooked Duolingo has been gamified with a reward system involving addictive points and stars along with a challenge mode where students can face off against their friends.

Duolingo’s long term goal looks to be translating the whole web, or at least a big portion of it: Von Ahn claims Duolingo could translate all 2 billion words of Wikipedia in only 80 hours with a crowd of 1 million users – and do it all for free (sort of).

With this project (and other crowdsourcing translation initiatives such as Transfluent, hopefully, before long, when we want to read the thoughts and opinions of other people on the web, we won’t be limited to those people who happen to speak the same language as us. And, just maybe, we’ll be able to find Volumes 15 through 27 of Talking Cat Dragon-Boy romance series without all that grief.