Duolingo launches language translation and education website
Duolingo, a combination free language education website and crowd-sourced online language translation service is dedicated to translating the web into every language by having language students translate it while they learn a new language for free.
Duolingo currently supports English, German, French, or Spanish, and there are plans to add Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese in the near future. The website was co-founded by crowd-sourcing pioneer Luis von Ahn, who also developed CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA and the Google Image Labeler.
“Duolingo, which opened to the public on Tuesday (June 19), proposes to put armies of language learners to work translating text on the Web. For the learners, Duolingo offers basic lessons, followed by sentences to translate, one at a time, from simple to more difficult. For online content providers wanting translations, Duolingo offers, for now at least, free labor,” according to the New York Times.
"Duolingo leverages the brain power of millions of people who are currently learning a new language to help translate the web," says Luis von Ahn.
"So much of the web is partitioned off by language barriers. With more than a billion people on the planet learning a new language, I knew this was the ultimate opportunity to not only provide accessible education resources, but also make the internet a truly world wide web."
Alex Dupont
See Also
- More about language translation
Translation is the act of rewriting a document, changing it into another language. The original language is called the "source" language. The language into which the source text is translated is called the "target" language. - Duolingo Launches Language Education and Translation Website to the Public
Duolingo, a combination free language education website and crowd-sourced online translation service, today became available to the public after a period of private beta. - More about Duolingo
Duolingo is an online social platform that teaches users a new language while they simultaneously translate content across the web. - More about Luis von Ahn
I build systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. - Wikipedia.org page on Dr. Luis von Ahn
Wikipedia biography