Hi all, I just found this today, from New Scientist: "learn a language, translate the web" http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328476.200-learn-a-language-translate-the-web.html It's an article about a startup (from the same fellow who did ReCaptcha) that provides language lessons by asking the students to translate sentences from websites - Duolingo http://duolingo.com/ The examples used in their own video and also the New Scientist article are all about translating the English Wikipedia into Spanish. Has anyone had any contact with them before?
Whilst this project provides language lessons at no-cost I do NOT expect this system to be "free" in the FOSS sense. Nevertheless, if the translations are valuable, and the project proves to be popular (generating lots of translations), do we think it would be worthwhile to contact the organisation to try and feed their "best" wikipedia translations back into the Wikipedias as suggestions? Perhaps a bot could place it on the talkpage of existing articles by under the heading of "suggested content from en.wp by crowdsourced translations"? Though, I don't know how it would work for articles that don't exist in that language yet... >From a legal standpoint I believe translations are derivative works and therefore, because of the Share-Alike principle, the translations are already legally compatible to be re-imported. Just a thought, no idea if it can work in practice though. In any case, Duolingo seems to be an interesting project and time will tell whether it actually is a useful method for people to learn a language (or not)! -Liam Peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l