Those of you involved in the ‘business’ of translation, whether for gain or pleasure (or a mixture of both) will probably be interested, more likely  alarmed, to hear about “Duolingo”, the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, an American computer scientist. The business strategy behind Duolingo is adroit : Duolingo  offers  free online tutoring but doubles as a non-free translation service. Nothing specially innovative about that, you might think : there exist several good free educational sites on the web (I recommend Khan Academy) while there is a growing need for translators, especially in technical areas, because of globalisation. But Duolingo joins the two strands together to form a closed loop : learners pay for their tuition by translating material which can be sold on, so Duolingo has it both ways !

       So far, where translation is concerned, computers and artificial intelligence have proved to be no match for humans : chess programmes can beat grandmasters but automated translations are usually awful. This is not surprising : you don’t need life experience to solve Sudokus but language, even that used in technical manuals, crucially depends on context — a computer finds it hard to decide whether a ‘plant’ is the vegetable or industrial variety.  But what about learner human translators? Are they going to provide unexpected competition for the professionals? The idea is not so daft as it may sound : there will apparently be a system of cross-checks and revisions before a Duolingo translation is given the OK. It is not inconceivable that a large and varied number of enthusiastic translators, if properly supervised, could come up with something quite interesting.

Von Ahn seems to have his sights more on factual stuff than the sort of material showcased on this website  — one of his aims is to get the whole of Wikipedia translated into Spanish without paying a penny — but learners might well have something to offer even in the field of literature proper. The Elizabethan and Jacobean era was a golden age for fine translations (Chapman’s Homer, Plutarch, The King James Bible, &c.) although, by modern standards, the translators were rank amateurs. Beginners have an enthusiasm for a new language and its poetry that people who translate for a living have, in most cases, long since lost : Ezra Pound, arguably the greatest 20th century English translator of poetry, remained gloriously ignorant of most of the languages (Provencal, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese) he trafficked in.

 Maybe, given the nature of von Ahn’s business formula, one ought to get one of his students to translate into English the French expression, “Aux frais de la princesse” , or, better still  —  but this would be for advanced students only — into Sixties Cockney. We’ll see if any Duolingo student manages to come up with “Down to Larkin” which is what you said to a London publican when he asked you to settle up for your last ten pints.   S.H.  

Note : I heard about Duolingo via the excellent article “Learn a language, translate the web” by Jim Giles (New Scientist, 14 Jan pp. 18-19)