HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

How can you translate the entire internet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

I am currently using Duolingo to learn Spanish and I find it quite amazing. It offers a great interface and I love the gaming elements. It's by far one of the best web applications I have used in a long time. So kudos to Luis von Ahn and the team!

I recommend watching his TedX talk (the mind boggling thing from the presentation is: English Wikipedia could be translated in 80 hours if 1 million people used Duolingo!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

this is a TED talk from the same guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

von Ahn gave a talk at Carnegie Mellon last spring on Duolingo as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

⬐ nickpinkston

Yea, that was a great talk - I was there. I love the n-sided task arbitrages this guys comes up with. Is there a word for these? I mean "games for good" is a subset, crowdsourcing a superset, but is there anything more specific?

Another language learning tool by the creator of Captcha:

www.duolingo.com

check out a description at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

⬐ brianobush

No news yet and their twitter feed is dead silent. They are only offering a couple languages initially as well (with no Japanese in sight)

⬐ koopajah

Yeah but it was announced a few months ago in this presentation a no real news from it (i've subscribed as soon as possible to the mailing list)

First thing: Watch this video from Luis von Ahn http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

He is the creator of reCAPTCHA and working on a translation solution which answers your question (regarding how to get people to eagerly do work for your community) pretty eloquently.

Regarding your specific user engagement problem... I would venture to say that the problem you're solving here is not clear. You describe what your site can DO! But not what your site DOES for me. In other words, you're solving problems. Not providing solutions. This blog post from Dave McClure is pretty relevant here, too: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/08/your-solution-is...

Despite the aggressive tone of the article, I think there's a good insight on how you should be "pitching" on your website's landing page.

⬐ edwardy20

Awesome links. At first I thought it would work like Yahoo Answers or Quora- where there is no obvious benefit to answering questions. But I will refocus my efforts to let people learn a language and translate at the same time. Thanks a bunch!

⬐ spaceneedle55

I love the mention of CAPTCHArt