ReadLang bought by Duolingo

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Cavesa
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby Cavesa » Sat Nov 18, 2017 1:52 pm

As long as the functions remain the same and price reasonable, even if payment becomes obligatory, I am ok and hope the inventor has got a lot of money for it.

However, looking at the tendency of various services for learners to dumb stuff down and make it ugly, kitsch, "fun" at all costs, and above all hypereasy, I am a bit worried. We are in an era of many possibilities, but marketers simply choose to make many of them dumb. Serious learners are not seen as a good market.

So, the same readlang or better (not sure how could it be better): great.

Overly colourful "readlang" with only prechosen content (worthless for me like on Lang8) payed in a package with useless stuff: There is still LWT. :-)
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby galaxyrocker » Sat Nov 18, 2017 8:52 pm

Stefan wrote:I remember reading articles many years ago about how Duolingo were supposed to make money by getting users to translate the web for free. I haven't used Duolingo in a long time but I believe they temporarily gave up the idea.

Monetizing crowd-sourced translation did not work out, and the "immersion" that was supposed to lead to that is not available in an obvious way to new members, and is seemingly not available to old ones as of today-- though it could just be that it is down. The revenue models now are based on offering cheaper testing to certify users in (for now) their English speaking/reading/writing abilities, and also they've begun having ads.

Maybe this is a step to resurrect the old idea. Or it's just a transfer of ownership so the owner doesn't have to fund Readlang by himself. Hosting it is a small thing for Duolingo so they can probably do it just for fun.



I doubt it's a step to bring that back. The bigger issue they ran into was European labor laws, IIRC. That, and the fact that the translations took so long, and everything was restarted by a sentence being set to zero simply because someone wanted points and changed "Beginning" to something like "start". It was a flawed system,and, really, I can't think of any reputable organization that would want documents translated by a bunch of beginner learners. They're better off trying to leverage ReadLang into a cheap subscriber model.
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Stefan
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby Stefan » Sat Nov 18, 2017 9:21 pm

galaxyrocker wrote:I doubt it's a step to bring that back. The bigger issue they ran into was European labor laws, IIRC.

TIL. I found a quote on Wiki from the terms and conditions of service, mentioning that users from EU wasn't allowed to use the translation function. There's a thread on Duolingo speculating in why because apparently (?) they never gave a reason. Their conclusion seem to be that it's either due to labor laws (they would have to pay the users) or tax laws (they would have to pay tax in EU). There's a Techcrunch article quoting "a spokesperson" about it:

The reasoning for this was that, though we could make it a profitable business, we realized we’d quickly become a translations business as we’d have to hire people focused on quality control, sales people, etc. and eventually businesses tend to pay more attention to the parts of the company that are profitable.

I guess there's some truth to this although it doesn't explain their terms and conditions.
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby Keys » Sat Nov 18, 2017 9:37 pm

Readlang has quite a lot of copyright-infringing material, for all I know. Harry Potter, Amber series, Lord of the Rings, and a lot more in Russian for example. Duolingo is now the proud owner of that, wonder if they're going to clean that up soon.

In any case I like real stories / literature better than the artificial stories they offer on Duolingo stories at the moment. There are so many places where you can get simple reader material that it doesn't offer much extra in my opinion.

The difference with Duolingo's stories is that they're going to be correctly translated word for word, instead of Readlang's googlefied translation with dictionaries.

But learning for example Swedish while reading Stieg Larson's series with word for word translation would be much more interesting than reading how John orders a steak in some restaurant.
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby aokoye » Sat Nov 18, 2017 11:10 pm

Keys wrote:Readlang has quite a lot of copyright-infringing material, for all I know. Harry Potter, Amber series, Lord of the Rings, and a lot more in Russian for example. Duolingo is now the proud owner of that, wonder if they're going to clean that up soon.

I didn't even think of that but you're spot on. In addition to what you listed there are likely countless news stories that people have copied and pasted. Assuming Duolingo cleans that up, which they need to for their own legal health, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy people.
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Cavesa
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby Cavesa » Sun Nov 19, 2017 12:32 am

Keys wrote:Readlang has quite a lot of copyright-infringing material, for all I know. Harry Potter, Amber series, Lord of the Rings, and a lot more in Russian for example. Duolingo is now the proud owner of that, wonder if they're going to clean that up soon.

In any case I like real stories / literature better than the artificial stories they offer on Duolingo stories at the moment. There are so many places where you can get simple reader material that it doesn't offer much extra in my opinion.

The difference with Duolingo's stories is that they're going to be correctly translated word for word, instead of Readlang's googlefied translation with dictionaries.

But learning for example Swedish while reading Stieg Larson's series with word for word translation would be much more interesting than reading how John orders a steak in some restaurant.


Sharing this content is troublesome for the service (I don't know why some learners share it publicly there, instead of the usual channels, and don't just use it in the private library on readlang, and the private libraries should pose no problem at all) but that shouldn't be a reason to put the whole opportunity to upload books away.

Life is too short to spend too much of it on Exchange Student John's "adventures". Especially for learners of more languages. :-D

Sure, the google translated dictionary is by far not perfect (I would love to choose from several dictionaries, like I could on Lingua.ly), but if I am to choose, I am all for an imperfect dictionary and good content rather than a perfect dictionary and content I can't stand.
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Cainntear
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby Cainntear » Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:51 pm

Stefan wrote:
galaxyrocker wrote:I doubt it's a step to bring that back. The bigger issue they ran into was European labor laws, IIRC.

TIL. I found a quote on Wiki from the terms and conditions of service, mentioning that users from EU wasn't allowed to use the translation function.

That whole thing should have got them sunk. The terms and conditions explicitly say that any change will be communicated to users, and they hid this one away. The Ts&Cs effectively put the onus on users by saying that if you used "immersion" you were not in the EU, but never told us that they'd done it. It was a potentially legally incompetent document, and they were potentially in willful breach of law when they made the decision not to properly inform users.

The free labour thing was a big issue, and if there's a profession in Europe you don't want to mess with, it's the translators, because they've got the ear of EU politicians and diplomats in a very literal way.

At the end of the day, if they'd continued down that track, the issue would have been raised in some jurisdiction or other.
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby aokoye » Sun Nov 19, 2017 6:12 pm

Cavesa wrote:Sharing this content is troublesome for the service (I don't know why some learners share it publicly there, instead of the usual channels, and don't just use it in the private library on readlang, and the private libraries should pose no problem at all) but that shouldn't be a reason to put the whole opportunity to upload books away.

Even in private libraries works that aren't out of copyright are going to potentially be an issue because DL's servers are hosting them. If a publisher were to serve them a subpoena in relation to copyright infringement they would be in a world of hurt.
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Cainntear
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby Cainntear » Sun Nov 19, 2017 7:37 pm

aokoye wrote:
Cavesa wrote:Sharing this content is troublesome for the service (I don't know why some learners share it publicly there, instead of the usual channels, and don't just use it in the private library on readlang, and the private libraries should pose no problem at all) but that shouldn't be a reason to put the whole opportunity to upload books away.

Even in private libraries works that aren't out of copyright are going to potentially be an issue because DL's servers are hosting them. If a publisher were to serve them a subpoena in relation to copyright infringement they would be in a world of hurt.

Highly unlikely.
Dropbox, Gmail, and many many others are allowed to let you store whatever the hell you like and don't have to check for copyright infringement, because copyright infringement occurs only when material is published. If you put the material in and only you can access it, it's not being published, and most countries don't have laws that concern themselves with that.
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aokoye
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Re: ReadLang bought by Duolingo

Postby aokoye » Sun Nov 19, 2017 8:11 pm

Cainntear wrote:
aokoye wrote:
Cavesa wrote:Sharing this content is troublesome for the service (I don't know why some learners share it publicly there, instead of the usual channels, and don't just use it in the private library on readlang, and the private libraries should pose no problem at all) but that shouldn't be a reason to put the whole opportunity to upload books away.

Even in private libraries works that aren't out of copyright are going to potentially be an issue because DL's servers are hosting them. If a publisher were to serve them a subpoena in relation to copyright infringement they would be in a world of hurt.

Highly unlikely.
Dropbox, Gmail, and many many others are allowed to let you store whatever the hell you like and don't have to check for copyright infringement, because copyright infringement occurs only when material is published. If you put the material in and only you can access it, it's not being published, and most countries don't have laws that concern themselves with that.

Hence my, if they were served with a subpoena, not when.

edit: for what it's worth I doubt anything will happen in terms of legal issues, given that Scribd exists despite the multiple takedown notices it's gotten since 2007. It's not like they're hosting Disney movies or something.
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