Re: [lojban] Can we get lojban on Duolingo?

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 02:48:15AM -0500, Danny Pickle wrote:
> http://duolingo.com/ - Think re-captcha (actually made by the same
> guy), but for teaching machines to translate while you learn a new
> language
> 
> Seems cool, but me wants lojban!

How would Lojban help at all?

The way duolingo works is that as a native speaker of X, you want to
learn Y, so you read sentences on the web in Y, and translate them
to X.

This means there needs to be a bunch of stuff on the web in the
language you want to learn (Lojban) for you to translate.  This very
much isn't the case.  And why would you want to translate all the
Lojban stuff to English anyways? :)  Kind of kills people's
motivation to learn Lojban to read it!

Doing it the other way doesn't work because you already know
English, and because the expectation is that when a duolingo user
outputs a sentence, that sentence is of high quality in X,
regardless of whether it correctly translates the sentence in Y;
this wouldn't be true for people trying to learn Lojban by claiming
they already know Lojban and want to learn English, so it would
reduce the quality of the output significantly.

One *always* wants translations to be done by people fluent in the
target language; watch bad anime fan subs to see why.  Even if the
meaning isn't translated perfectly, at least that way the reader
isn't cringing the whole time.

-Robin

-- 
http://singinst.org/ :  Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei".   My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.