O/T Soon a way forward on MK translations?

[جبريل 無道]

First we had babelfish, which provided practically literal dictionary translations and was garbage.

Next we had Google Translate.  What they did differently was to use as a base United Nation texts, which must be translated in many language professionally, as a base.  But as one can imagine, that is extremely formal and can be stilted, especially on informal stuff.  From French to English or German to English, I will say it's pretty decent.  Much better than Japanese to English, for whatever reason.  The asian languages seem to pose a big problem.

Now comes DuoLingo.  DuoLingo has two parts to it.  One side is a competitor to Rosetta Stone, which costs hundreds of dollars and has multiple levels to purchase for every language someone wants to learn.  DuoLingo is free.  I tried Rosetta stone trial in the distant past and I tried DuoLingo for Spanish (I'm unfamiliar with) and German and French and I have to say it's very decent product on my tablet.  Better than Rosetta Stone.  It's actually starting to beat Rosetta Stone in Google searches, RS spends $100M/year on ads, DL $0.

The trick of DuoLingo is that it's by that guy behind the CAPTCHA.  Sometime after he helped make that, he realized that 10s/100s millions of people were spending 10 seconds each day wasting their time on those with no benefit to anyone.  He made the ReCAPTCHA, with 2 words - 1 known to the system and 1 unknown - and after the unknown word garnered multiple identical results from multiple people, it was considered solved.  And thus, they helped Libraries digitize millions books leaps and bounds away from current OCR software could manage.  And that is the other side of DuoLingo - providing translations services on the backs of the very students who are trying to learn.  And multiple results gets averaged to one translation as good as a professionals.

They estimated that translating the English Wikipedia to Spanish (because the Spanish is only 20% of the English one) with traditional professional translators, it would cost $50M.  With DuoLingo, it could be achieved in 5 weeks with 100,000 active users.  I presume they will be much cheaper as part of their business model...

http://www.youtube.com/v/cQl6jUjFjp4

Right now they have western languages, but a couple of days ago they came out with a Language Incubator to help other groups publish other languages rather than trying to do it all themselves... I'm going to be very interested when the Japanese comes out and how it will turn out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo

http://www.duolingo.com/

Who knows?  In a couple years, you guys might be submitting some OCRed text from the latest MK doujin or the MK novels to Duoling for a penny per word cost... and if you're trying to learn French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese now, I recommend it.

[Tenchi Ryu]

you guys might be submitting some OCRed text from the latest MK doujin or the MK novels to Duoling for a penny per word cost...