News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in ... by ColinDabritz on Friday November 09, 2012 @01:22PM (#4764033)
Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of reCAPTCHA, has a fascinating project going:

http://duolingo.com/

The idea is to teach people language at the same time as providing a real time translation service. Apparently if you multi-plex novices (and not at a bad rate) you get expert translation at a similar accuracy. The translators benefit by learning language, and the service is self supporting by proving translation.

He did an excellent TED talk on the subject:

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_c...

Re:Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in ... by Tipzntrix on Friday November 09, 2012 @03:28PM (#4764610)
Sounds like taking on interns or co-ops. Pretty nice idea.