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Interesting, but I'm skeptical. I studied translation, and noticed to my surprise that the foreign language part of translating is fairly easy, unless it's hig
by merloen 15y ago
Interesting, but I'm skeptical.
I studied translation, and noticed to my surprise that the foreign language part of translating is fairly easy, unless it's highly technical, or contains dialect or slang.
The hard part was the command of my native language. I was pretty literate, but the translations I produced weren't good enough - they were accurate, but wooden, and they stayed too close to the original. What I had to learn was my own native language.
So I have doubts about the quality of the translations, and I have doubts about how they're planning to merge translations from different users, which sounds like a very tricky problem.
And it looks like the only exercise they use is to translate the foreign language (e.g. Spanish) into the native language, which will teach you to read, but not to write, speak or understand Spanish.
Nevertheless, a fascinating experiment, and an extremely ingenious idea.