Translation is costly, but the cost of translating a popular article may be smaller than the total costs of all people who would otherwise have to read it in a foreign language.
As a model, let’s say that reading an English article by a person with English as a first language, costs 1 point of energy. Reading the same article by a person with English as a second language, may cost 2 to 10 points, depending on how good that person is in English. Translating the article to another language would be perhaps 100 or 1000 points. Assuming these numbers, once you have enough readers with a native language X, it becomes globally cheaper to provide an official translation to X in addition to the original English article.
In the other direction, it may be useful to provide an ability to write articles in X, and then translate the popular ones to English. This is probably even more useful, because writing in a foreign language is more costly than reading. On the other hand, the filtering of the good articles (worth translating) must be done in the original language X, so there must already be a strong community.
On the other hand, if there are more versions of the article, the discussion will be split. But again, to some people this reduces the costs of participating. (Perhaps the best rated comments could be translated by volunteers too?)
Perhaps this is a bias when thinking about languages: One language would be cheaper than many languages. But in a situation where we already have people speaking fluently in different languages, translation may be cheaper than using one language. Especially if we can have a good filter for translating only the best things.
I think the situation is grainier than you imply—there has to be a motivation to translate, whether for love or money. “Worth translating” isn’t floating out there in the aether. Instead, translation only happens if someone cares enough to make it happen.
Take the blog which has criticism of American and Israeli politicians in English and criticism of Arab politicians in Arabic. Who’s going to translate the Arabic parts into English? Someone who’s fascinated by Arab politics? Someone who wants to get the politicians and/or the blogger into trouble? There might be other motivations as well, but whatever it is will have to be fairly strong, especially if much of the blog is going to get translated.
I think the point of the article is that everyone adopting the same language has such a high upfront cost that it isn’t going to happen any time soon, and it’s interesting to look at the consequences, including the unexpected consequence that the web lowers the barriers to connection so much that minority languages are less disadvantaged than they used to be.
What advances in IA would be needed to make learning languages easier?
Translation is costly, but the cost of translating a popular article may be smaller than the total costs of all people who would otherwise have to read it in a foreign language.
As a model, let’s say that reading an English article by a person with English as a first language, costs 1 point of energy. Reading the same article by a person with English as a second language, may cost 2 to 10 points, depending on how good that person is in English. Translating the article to another language would be perhaps 100 or 1000 points. Assuming these numbers, once you have enough readers with a native language X, it becomes globally cheaper to provide an official translation to X in addition to the original English article.
In the other direction, it may be useful to provide an ability to write articles in X, and then translate the popular ones to English. This is probably even more useful, because writing in a foreign language is more costly than reading. On the other hand, the filtering of the good articles (worth translating) must be done in the original language X, so there must already be a strong community.
On the other hand, if there are more versions of the article, the discussion will be split. But again, to some people this reduces the costs of participating. (Perhaps the best rated comments could be translated by volunteers too?)
Perhaps this is a bias when thinking about languages: One language would be cheaper than many languages. But in a situation where we already have people speaking fluently in different languages, translation may be cheaper than using one language. Especially if we can have a good filter for translating only the best things.
I think the situation is grainier than you imply—there has to be a motivation to translate, whether for love or money. “Worth translating” isn’t floating out there in the aether. Instead, translation only happens if someone cares enough to make it happen.
Take the blog which has criticism of American and Israeli politicians in English and criticism of Arab politicians in Arabic. Who’s going to translate the Arabic parts into English? Someone who’s fascinated by Arab politics? Someone who wants to get the politicians and/or the blogger into trouble? There might be other motivations as well, but whatever it is will have to be fairly strong, especially if much of the blog is going to get translated.
I think the point of the article is that everyone adopting the same language has such a high upfront cost that it isn’t going to happen any time soon, and it’s interesting to look at the consequences, including the unexpected consequence that the web lowers the barriers to connection so much that minority languages are less disadvantaged than they used to be.
What advances in IA would be needed to make learning languages easier?
What license is LW articles under? If they are CC you could just submit anything you want translated to Duolingo.
Edit: That only gives you five European languages, but it might be a start.
Old articles (eg) are unlabeled, thus not licensed for any other use, but new articles (like this open thread) have a CC icon saying “by attribution.”
AFAIK, LW articles are considered copyright of the original author; it’s the LW wiki which is supposed to be CC.