Duolingo’s Luis Von Ahn Talks Crowdsourcing With NBC Learn

NBC Learn posted a nice 5-minute video yesterday in which they discussed Duolingo and ReCAPTCHA with their creator, CMU Professor Luis von Ahn. I’ve written about Duolingo in the past, so it’s really nice to see so much attention being given towards it.

One point of contention, though: the video claims that there are almost 7 billion people worldwide who use the internet regularly. Not even close. The entire population of Earth would have to be online. The true figure, at least for 2011, is closer to 2.3 billion. Small difference.

Upgrade Unlocked: “Links” Page!

I’ve added a Links page in the top bar to organize all the awesome websites I’ve found in my internet travels. There’s nothing on there that hasn’t already appeared on Tiny Work, but now they’re all in one place and look prettier.

Babelverse Recruits and Pays Interpreters to Crowdsource Translation

As someone who has worked extensively with foreign languages, I know firsthand that translation can be a nightmare. As such, I am a sucker for a solid crowdsourcing app that focuses on translation. Babelverse is such an app, aiming to allow people to communicate seamlessly, wherever they are, in their own language(s).

Babelverse works by recruiting multilinguists to be “on call” at designated times to receive translation requests from their mobile application. Newbie translators start with casual conversations, and the client rates them after every session. Positive ratings increase their credibility and open up more translation opportunities for them. Interpreters are paid 70% of the interpretation fee as their reimbursement, and Babelverse decides their rates based on several parameters in order to avoid a “bid to the bottom”.

Human translation is preferable to computer-aided translation in almost every case, so this is a platform I’d be excited to see take off. My own knowledge of French is “un peu mauvais” at best, so if I have any true multilingual readers, I’d be interested to hear about the platform from an insider’s perspective.

Duolingo Teaches New Languages, Translates Websites

Hey, fellow students! Here are a couple of traits that may or may not apply to you:

• You are learning, or want to learn, a foreign language.
• You have been frustrated in the past by websites that would be useful… if only they were in English.

The answer to both of these issues lies in a creative application of crowdsourcing (surprise!).

Luis Von Ahn revolutionized how security and productivity could be combined when he pushed out ReCaptcha, and now he’s changing the game again with his company’s new release, Duolingo. It works by providing simple language-learning software, but with a twist; the “practice translations” provided to you are small excerpts from foreign-language websites. The program compares these skill-level-appropriate phrases to responses from everyone else using the app, and gradually combines them to produce a fully translated website.

This is pretty ingenious. You get to learn a new language, and internet users get a more universally accessible web experience. I have concerns that translations will be shaky at first; translating individual words and stringing them together can produce a vastly different sentence than simply translating an “idea”, but this is an issue that will become less relevant the more usage this application receives.

Although currently in beta, and with only Spanish and German available (French, Italian, and Chinese coming soon), Duolingo could still be a great opportunity for anyone who wants to learn a language while effortlessly giving something back.

By Seth W