“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

It is estimated that over one billion people worldwide are learning a foreign language, with millions doing so using computer programs. With Duolingo, people learn a foreign language while simultaneously translating text.

When you learn on Duolingo, the website gives you exercises tailored specifically to you that teach you every aspect of the new language. You may be asked to translate a sentence, to pronounce or listen to a phrase, or to describe what you see in an image.

Some of the sentences you translate come from real websites. By having multiple students translate each sentence, and then choosing the best one...

Duolingo produces translations that are as accurate as those from professional language translators.

We have all seen how systems such as Google Translate are improving every day at translating the gist of things written in other languages. Unfortunately, they are not yet accurate enough for my purpose: Even when what they spit out is intelligible, it's so badly written that I can't read more than a few lines before getting a headache. This is why you don't see machine-translated articles on CNN.

The idea behind Duolingo is to kill two birds with one stone by solving both of these problems simultaneously. We accomplish this by transforming language translation into something that anyone can do -- not just bilinguals -- and that millions of people want to do: learning a foreign language.

Luis von Ahn (@luisvonahn) is the founder and former CEO of ReCAPTCHA, Inc., and an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. ReCAPTCHA, acquired by Google in 2009, is helping to digitize books, one word at a time, by having millions of people from the Web decipher scanned words.

 

If hundreds of thousand of peopel contribute, we might be able to produce big steps for manking.

TED definition: TED is a nonprofit organization dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading," which it makes available through talks posted on its website. www.ted.com

source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/08/opinion/von-ahn-translate-web/

 

video Tsipras Austria 2015

http://www.oe24.at/oesterreich/politik/Uebersetzer-sorgt-fuer-Lacher-im-Internet-Audio/176243585

France 24 Paris Bruxelles 24 octobre 2016 

I interpreted the interview of Tsipras : I prefer to win the elections, and not the polls. This happend 3 times in 2015 and the Greek peopel will vote and decide 2019 again. 

and a few days later 26/10/2016 he makes the same declarations in Athens Greece with local interpreters interpreting his declarations, translated as following: 

Προτιμώ να κερδίζω τις εκλογές, παρά τις δημοσκοπήσεις, δήλωσε ο πρωθυπουργός Αλέξης Τσίπρας ενώπιον ομάδας δημοσιογράφων από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση...

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