With Luis von Ahn’s reCAPTCHA, users help correct distorted words in digitized books.
What’s the News: Nothing…yet! But word is that Luis von Ahn–the Carnegie Mellon professor behind the clever projects reCAPTCHA and ESP Game–is bringing his crowdsourcing know-how to bear on the problem of web translation. With Duolingo, a project his lab has been working on for the last year and a half, people learning new languages will serve as translators. How well will that work? It remains to be seen, but according to von Ahn, a private beta version should be launching in several weeks.
How the Heck: Getting good translations online is difficult; it generally requires a human being, and certainly isn’t free. von Ahn described his plan for making decent, free web translations possible to TechCrunch:
“The solution was to transform language translation into something that millions of people WANT to do, and that helps with ...
